“... crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to registrars and census enumerators might ...”

“... is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in. Peter was Doris’s third child, the one who in 1949 she took with her, when he was two, to London from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) along with her first finished manuscript, The Grass Is ...”

“... or on albums or in ordinary books. One was The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It had been published first in 1950, with a second edition in 1962. The other was The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Edited by A. Alvarez, it had a crazy Jackson Pollock painting on the cover. In the ...”

“... it to muffle his social discomfort, coming to depend on it as a way of sidestepping the world. By 1815, hunkered down among his books in Dove Cottage (known at the time as Town End, the lease of which De Quincey had taken over from the Wordsworths when they moved out), he was fully addicted. He was 29 and he was never to ...”

“... time, the Kaiser’s regime was rotten. My mother had spontaneous physical courage (not inherited by me). I crept after her, for one or two cautious looks.Sybille’s father, the Baron Maximilian von Schoenebeck, was the second son of a minor Bavarian nobleman. He did his time in the Prussian cavalry – ‘that overgrown body of sabre-rattling drones, that ...”

“... the room, sweat stains occasionally flashing under his arms, gesturing in a way that could never be Italian. The bell rings. The students file back in. He calls roll: Daryl Derek Randy Kevin. He divides the classroom in two. We are going to fight the Civil War again.Liberation Day, down to the title, is a spiritual successor to Saunders’s last ...”

“... one age from another, and without a grasp of which the political language of the past can be unintelligible. More interest is now taken in the culture of a period than in its economics, while the study of high politics seems jejune when it lacks a cultural dimension. Although the depth and durability of that trend cannot yet ...”

“... were notable for two blank spaces in the national consciousness. The first was the space left by community spirit: in the material circumstances that followed on the bombing of Germany’s cities and the unconditional surrender of the German Armed Forces, Volksgemeinschaft, the centrepiece of National Socialist ideology and propaganda, gave way to ...”

“... the other hand, when he and Burton went to Lake Tanganyika, they had been on a track well beaten by Arab slavers, and knew exactly what they could expect to find. No one who has flown over central Africa below the clouds, as I did on routes taking me from Uganda to Kenya, then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and ...”

“... Top floor, 11th, a terrace around two sides, overlooking all that famous bay and beach. Ships go by all the time, like targets in a shooting gallery, people walk their dogs – same dogs same time, same old man in blue trunks every morning with two Pekinese at 7a.m. – and at night the lovers on the mosaic sidewalks cast enormous long shadows over the ...”

“... sentence the most ambiguous form of mental sickness in our age: ‘But there are those who live by an enervated reason that owns no master in the soul, and who can find arguments that enable them to claim that the atrophy of the moral sense from which they suffer is in fact a form of rational judgment.’ This is precisely what Søren Kierkegaard ...”

“... British attitudes to the intelligence services are governed by two separate obsessions. The discovery of Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blunt as Soviet agents has produced a long-lasting preoccupation with hunting down moles, ‘agents of influence’ and the like. Newspapers love it, the public are interested, and the whole business is endlessly stoked by the more enfevered spirits of the Right ...”

“... shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes this to be the work of Max who, scarcely out of his teens, already has two children and is, I imagine, Catholic. R., whose feelings about religion are more uncompromising than mine, finds the cross disturbing and is determined to ask Eugene to tell Max to take it ...”

“... the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it. It is a place often defined by its contradictions, in which tribal codes of desert and oasis – puritanical, patriarchal, frugal and austere – co-exist and frequently clash with lavish displays of wealth and such emblems of modernity as air-conditioned shopping malls, designer boutiques ...”

“... which were nonetheless hailed as a triumph for the ‘centrist’ winner.The left, let’s be honest, has had a pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Brazil etc, but also a consequence of its failure to come up with a new ideological framework to match the new ...”