“... seven out of nine states that had abandoned it embraced it again in the decades after the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution; sometimes – as in its tacit acceptance of lynching and of the quasi-judicial hangings which gave mob murder a veneer of legitimacy – horribly out of step. But basically part of the pack and notably so in the shadow of the ...”

“... cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash at Yale – is still v. buff – and has pledged to help me push the wheelchair around. Neither of us has been ...”

“... Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, ‘an unimpressive man; eyes disappointing; rather heavy; middle-class; sunk; grumpy; self-important; wore a black waistcoat’. They all called each other Van, Bogey, Ramsay, Eadie, across the table; engaged in governing England ... Bogey has the glazed stuffed look of the well fed bachelor. Is evidently one of those elderly ...”

“... order of things – an ornament of gentlemanly education which served to mark and reinforce class privilege. In Shakespeare’s day, however, study of the classics was a pragmatic requirement. ‘Reading and imitating classical literature were not activities only to be undertaken with reverence and awe … It was just what you did … an engagement ...”

“... and keep her.’ What happened on that day was, from his perspective, not a rebellion but a civil war among Elizabeth’s followers, fought between her true friends and her secret enemies. In seeking to illustrate Essex’s murderous intent, the Government fell back on cloudy insinuation. Had the rising succeeded, it indicated, he would have permitted her to ...”

“... rum and lime, with enormous hilarity.When I was about fifteen, while John was fighting a gallant war over the Atlantic, my father started to drink again.Heavy drinking is often associated with boisterous behaviour in a social context. My father never drank publicly at all and, drunk or sober, was never boisterous. He saw himself as a nobleman; and his style ...”

“... cabaret-owner and trainer of young talent. Badia’s career as a dancer ended around World War Two, but her true heir and disciple was Tahia Carioca, who was, I think, the finest belly-dancer ever. Now 75 and living in Cairo, she is still active as an actress and political militant, and, like Um Kalthoum, the remarkable symbol of a national culture. Um ...”

“... is among the most racially-divided societies anywhere. Within a huge mulatto and black under-class, racked by permanent unemployment, drugs and Aids, homicide is the leading cause of death among young males. American economic hegemony, taken for granted a generation ago, is being eroded by the successes of Japan and the EEC. In the southern Americas the ...”

“... recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick observations on Norwegians (‘devoted to patriotism, ecological uprightness, liberated but worried ...”

“... problematic. Mandela is now an homme d’état, accountable largely to the business and political class. Like all grandees, he publishes with an eye to present duties (no less than to posterity). The result is too much retrospective homily and oiling, not to say greasing, of troubled waters; the reader soon feels like a gull in a tanker spillage. The resumé ...”

“... rewriting for our days of Vanity Fair. Like Thackeray’s, Wolfe’s satire is ‘a declaration of war on the established order of things’. And in the style of Thackeray’s ‘How to live on nothing a year’ Wolfe offers at the centre of his black comedy a hilariously plausible accounting of how in New York you can go broke on $980,000 a year (‘the ...”

“... Wilder and Zinneman), as did about twenty producers; only one actor agreed; in the spectator class there were about ten programmers and nearly forty critics, all of them contributors to Time Out. The results were published last month. The list of best directors, 14 of them, includes neither Buñuel nor Rossellini nor Godard nor Mizoguchi and the list of ...”

“... was a prophetic mirage. What that involved was the discovery of an entire supranational social class equipped with equivalent electric powers. Geographical Tibet was not on this menu. However, Lenin did think that a virtual-Tibetan élite of superman-monks was required to galvanise the proletariat. Attempts to realise these prophecies – and the struggle ...”

“... and held that many other mental illnesses are accompanied by hallucinations. Just before World War Two, Kurt Schneider produced a list of 12 ‘First Rank Symptoms’, with auditory hallucinations top of the list. When First Rank Symptoms ruled the diagnostic roost, a lot more people became schizophrenic than would ever have been so classified in the wards ...”

“... the composer thought he had transcribed (in reality, older Gypsies had taken the tunes from middle-class Magyars), Liszt saw ideal music-making as both untutored and improvisatory. Manuel de Falla had the same inspiration, as did Lorca. Having discovered among Andalusian Gypsies the authentic cante jondo – ‘deep song’ – they both thought modern ...”