“... 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 ...”

“... laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat here, he took a tram, he dined alone in the ‘white’ room. Look at his memorial, his Margate plaque, the anagram on ...”

“... a couple of other collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of place. It’s true that he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil. It is nice to see that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts. Eugène-François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, where his parents ran a bakery. After bullying and pilfering his way through ...”

“... than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth. Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground had been killed. Bodies and debris were ...”

“... connected to the rest of the book.) And these strands correspond, roughly speaking, to the general class structure of Amis’s fiction, as disclosed in the final pages of Koba the Dread. ‘The aristocracy, the intelligentsia’ and ‘the lumpenproletariat’ take their turns in the spotlight, while ‘the urkas’ – the criminal classes – drive the ...”

“... pick up the wrong utensil and you won’t get invited back. Good manners can serve as a tool of class oppression by dint of their essential arbitrariness – we decide what counts as good behaviour so that you can’t share in its benefits. And even though they are not numerical, social codes are also a scoring system. The better you play the game the more ...”

“... error, or who argue, in the face of that critique, that amnesty was the only way of averting civil war, do not put it quite like this. There is no doubt in Allan Boesak’s mind that the question of the Cradock Four would have been part of the secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid leaders: ‘The generals and architects of apartheid had ...”

“... was in Bern. In June, he learned that he had been accepted for the post of ‘technical expert III class’ in the Swiss Patent Office. When Marić joined him in Bern she didn’t bring the baby. In August the following year, Lieserl came down with scarlet fever. What happened to her after that, nobody knows. All traces of her existence were erased, and ...”

“... backwoods town of Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia may have seen a little excitement during the war, with passing armies, and loud meetings of brothers and sisters of the left arguing their position on this and that, but once the war was over and the soldiers on R&R had gone back to their real homes, it became a desert ...”

“... Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities of Nazi Germany before the war, and his ‘comprehensive interpretation’ of 18th-century thought was in part an expression of gratitude to the United States, which had welcomed him as a refugee and become his home. Gay presented the thinkers of the Enlightenment as a kind of family, cosy ...”

“... unity. Trump has ignored them, so Clinton and Obama announce elaborate online events to honour the Class of 2020, who will not have graduation ceremonies this year; and Bush, who rarely speaks publicly, releases a slick video with music and images of health workers and ‘ordinary’ citizens in masks. He says: ‘Let us remember how small our differences are ...”

“... subjected to repression, censorship and persecution under communist regimes during the Cold War was heroic. To assist individual writers in economic distress he conceived an ad hoc fund that channelled donations from an all-star roster of American authors, including William Styron, Bellow, Alison Lurie and Gore Vidal; even Irving Howe chipped in. It was ...”