“... scatter empty notebooks willy-nilly around the phone-booths of North America, in the hope and expectation that some phone-booth-using Ginsberg or Emily Dickinson will scrawl beautiful poems inside, and then pass the journal on – and the amazing thing is, they do. People go to make a telephone call, to cancel an appointment at the ...”

“... others, had earned the admiration of the Anglo-American upper classes was the great Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh. Most US politicians were eager to be associated with him and flocked to his side, but FDR couldn’t forgive the fact that Lindbergh was so seemingly unbothered by Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and its treatment of the Jews that he ...”

“... allies, the hardliners who had forcibly purged and dissolved the Long Parliament and brought Charles I to justice. Radical Puritans through the land, who had been troubled by Cromwell’s political ecumenicalism, rejoiced in his new readiness to prolong the war of light and darkness, to round on the ‘malignant’ and ‘delinquent’ Royalists (whose ...”

“... describe the ‘thousand gestures and motions’ he made, in his moment of crisis, without any hope of a response. Whatever form they took, the gestures and motions were, he thinks, an expression of despair, on his own behalf, and of sorrow on behalf of his dead comrades: ‘For, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three ...”

“... they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the ...”

“... am shortly going to take as much of my accumulated dose of sleeping draught as I can manage and hope that it will prove lethal. You know the reasons, food shortages and increasing debility and weariness – unlikeliness of us winning the war etc. etc.’When the news came through of Norton’s death, Elisabeth’s parents, who were in Ankara, sent a ...”

“... Parliament, cynosure of the Victorian feminist eye, was exclusively male. Nor was there much hope of coercing politicians without a substantial) rank and file, and this could hardly be recruited in such a way. Lord Hugh Cecil once pointed out that’a class is in its very idea a separate thing with common interests,’ whereas ‘sex is just the ...”

“... for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city ...”

“... forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because ...”

“... Orwell for undergraduates, his own ten commandments for his infinitely sicker graduate students. I hope that Melanie Phillips of the Guardian is safely past the forty mark, since she writes as though she is: ‘Correct spelling, punctuation and an elementary grasp of sentence structure now seem to be luxuries, even among the so-called educated classes with a ...”

“... There are whole pages off which one can feel the acne rise. Then he adds, piously: ‘My earnest hope ... is that this book should not be sexist.’ In fact, it is beyond sexism. A man who, with a perfectly straight face, can describe the photographer hero of Antonioni’s movie, Blow Up, as having ‘a corps of lovely cavorting dolly birds at his ...”

“... code names in the computer, names relating to literature and philosophy, so that one is codenamed Charles Dickens, another Bertrand Russell. The killer is one of these: code name Wittgenstein. The trouble with such dead-clever stuff as this is that it wavers between seriousness and farce, and also that the cleverness makes more jarring the frequent lapses ...”

“... any endeavour, many with great skill and ability, can take justifiable Pride and will, I earnestly hope, feel that they will be sharing in the Honour conferred on me.’ Bradford. We film a medical room in a dye-works in Prague in 1910 set up in the empty stockroom of Downs, Coulter and Co, a textile merchants that closed down in 1974. On the wall is an ...”

“... back a long way, and perhaps the classic illustration is to be found in the 1870s with the case of Charles Marvin, who later established a considerable reputation as an author on the affairs of Europe and Central Asia. Contemporary critics praised his books about Russia and the East. Except by scholars, these works are long forgotten, but what is remembered is ...”

“... trying to convert the knots and twists of Russian and French sentences into intelligible and, I hope, fluent English; I’ve also translated books and articles. On the one hand, ‘You talk – I talk’; on the other, ‘You write – I write.’ The translator has time to change, edit and refine his text. He also has a desk, entire shelves full of ...”