“... always. A freshly laundered and brilliantly starched white shirt with narrow black stripes. A brown, green and gold tie in broad stripes, of stiff and hard imitation watered silk. The particulars neither solicit nor receive celebration, and the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the trousers.’ The clothes are ready for wearing on ...”

“... to 1930, by 66 per cent; from 1940 to 1950 by 53 per cent; from 1950 to 1960 by 49 per cent. Pat Brown, a former governor of California, has called this ‘the greatest mass migration in the history of the world’, which may be judged an example of boosterism as well as the creeping exaggeration common in political language. But Didion may be too forbidding ...”

“... as the demise of the New Yorker. Shawn is fired in 1987; Robert Gottlieb becomes editor; then Tina Brown. David Remnick’s tenure is beyond the frame of this book. Mehta understands that times change and that the New Yorker had become more than a little unworldly. ‘We were courting disaster,’ he says of himself and his ...”

“... in the long decade of 1872-84 were born Marcel Mauss (1872), Alfred Kroeber (1876), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881), and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884), with Ruth Benedict (1887) at the tail end. The second generation were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont ...”

“... travellers eager not only to witness but to participate in the old ways of the high jungle and brown river. Joyless but determined as penitents, credit-card visitors grasp the proffered tribal hands, sway and stamp to the beat of a small drum, as they try to evaluate the authenticity of the chanting voices and the provocations of a monkey-man trickster in ...”

“... readers. Are you so unconsciously racist that you didn’t notice this woman or this wizard was brown-skinned? Didn’t you realise that the person you thought was an alien is actually from Earth?For Le Guin these questions almost always led back to one core idea about people. They get stuff wrong even when they want to get it right, and the more they think ...”

“... Commonwealth immigration it was clear that British subjecthood was racialised and that black and brown Jamaicans did not enjoy the privileges of freeborn Englishmen.Approximately​ 12 million African captives were forcibly transported to the Americas in the early modern period. Many died on the passage across the Atlantic. A significant number, bought and ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... Speaking of a piece in gypsum alabaster, Penny writes: ‘The stone is white but with a few brown streaks in it and a network of translucent veinings, giving it an organic appearance, even more so than that of ivory, and this, together with its softness, makes it an almost alarming material in which to see naked flesh represented.’ The materials of ...”

“... Auster: his ex-wife is Delia (Auster’s Lydia), his present Iris (Auster’s Siri); his son is David (Auster’s Daniel), his daughter Sonia (Auster’s Sophie). Even the dates seem to correspond. At the front, indeed, ‘the author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction’. This teasing game plays dangerously on ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... in their requirements, to survive our wholesale transformation of their environment. The Brown Satyr butterfly, endemic to San Francisco, where I live, became extinct sometime in the 19th century, and the Xerxes Blue vanished during World War Two when its Golden Gate habitat was overtaken by military expansion. A number of other local species – the ...”

“... they haven’t gone very far. Visiting dignitaries to the Green Zone, whether George Bush, Gordon Brown or Barack Obama, seldom realise the extent of the military operations required to protect them or the impact of these operations on Iraqis, and so get an exaggerated impression of the progress towards normality in Baghdad. Last year, US embassy employees ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”