“... existentialist you ever saw’ and she lunched her way around Manhattan, becoming close to Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen (left-wing Americans who criticised their country in a way that made you love it more), before taking off for Vassar, then Chicago, California, Texas, New Orleans and New Mexico.She’d been told to look up Nelson Algren when ...”

“... and more and more: the evidence of erotic excess. Bayley alluded to this excess in his memoirs; Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) offers a sliver. But neither gives anything like an adequate sense of the scale of it, and it is impossible to do so here. Not even Conradi himself can quite manage it: his six hundred or so pages are too few for what he has to ...”

“... Anderson shows that Marx’s views on Asia differed little from those of Hegel, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and a host of others; they were all peering through the wrong end of a telescope, or in a mirror, weighing a smattering of knowledge of Asia against their understanding of how the West developed. And Marx never took the ‘Asiatic mode’ very seriously; he ...”

“... a whirling dervish, she lost the thread of one existence and found another.’ It’s as if Sir Richard Burton had set out to write a Mills and Boon romance. Brick Lane truly comes alive only when its male characters, particularly the older ones, enter the fray. This isn’t just because they are more gabby and engaged, less likely to be sitting at home ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... through the windows of Newcastle’s law courts. Inside Court One, the prosecuting barrister, Richard Wright, was about to show a video of the murder scene. Wright has a commanding presence and an instinct for the dramatic. What the jurors were about to see was disturbing, he said. There would be blood, although Nikki’s body would be pixellated. Boyd ...”

“... were in the mid 1970s coming to represent a sort of alternative establishment. His antipathy to Richard Branson was partly a matter of distaste for what Virgin represented (a music-first ethos of drift-and-discovery and whimsical eccentricity), but also a creeping fear, once the Pistols had joined the label, that the perpetually grinning Branson, in his ...”

“... Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on ...”

“... film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With ...”

“... held in the 1950s by academic pundits in the West, such as Alfred Guillaume and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who wrote general guides to Islam. The final chapters in such books invariably pontificated about how, if Islam was going to thrive in the future, it was going to have to adapt to Western ways and accommodate its outdated theology and law to modern science ...”

“... to keep in check broke loose, electing three Conservative leaders in succession – Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon ...”

“... would’ve, or did you?’ they asked. ‘I did,’ said Ingram, quite calmly. A psychologist, Richard Peterson, was brought in to help interrogate Ingram: his role was vital because he gave Ingram an explanation of what was happening to him. When Ingram asked why he had no memory of what he’d done, Peterson told him that it was ‘not uncommon for ...”

“... right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where buying CDs was cheaper than renting them from the BBC music library, and away from the BBC’s fact-checking services, where checking pronunciation was charged at £12 a word. As a consequence of producer choice, the BBC closed down its ...”

“... on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and considers Smith’s Rhodesia a great agricultural success story. By that time the war between black ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”