“... 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 ...”

“... Anniversary of the Founding of the Republic. The fifth under German occupation, and we pray it may be the last. We’d been promised reinforcements today, waited all day, at last they came. What a crew – worse than useless. As far as I can tell they are Prague coffee-house Jews, the lot of them. They all speak Czech – of sorts (!). It does seem to have ...”

“... of a shooting; the vehicles are apparently unequipped to assess these situations and respond by stopping. Direct communication isn’t an option: the only way to get a driverless car to do anything is to contact the company in charge of it.In early October, a driverless car owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General ...”

“... Hitler had just invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany. In 1946, backed by a socialist mayor, Raymond Picaud, and funded by the Confédération Générale du Travail (which still sits on the board, to little effect) and local unions – restaurateurs, hoteliers and even bakers – and following a ...”

“... for the Booker Prize in 2022. It has also been a very rooted life, not just in modern terms, but by the standards of any century. He was brought up in Alderley Edge in Cheshire and before he was a published writer bought part of a medieval hall house in Blackden, six miles away, with a £510 loan from the Order of Odd Fellows, buying the rest later for ...”

“... campaign in the US had been overwhelmingly favourable, and stayed so – frightened but thrilled by the imagery of revolution – for much of 1959, certainly for its opening months. Life magazine is a good barometer. Its 12 January issue carried nine pages of pictures under the headline ‘Dynamic Boss Takes Over a US Neighbour.’ On 19 January it had ...”

“... out into the world as I had expected I was offered the chance of putting Life off a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a subject I paid a disastrous visit to Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, thinking I might do something on the Franciscans. There had been a ...”

“... craters. I was even more surprised to learn that the tank was developed in the first instance not by the Army but by the Navy, which had already armoured its gunships and was open-minded about new inventions, prepared to back them even if they had no naval relevance. Patrick Wright’s fascinating book is a cultural rather ...”

“... Hanif Kureishi got me beaten up. Admittedly it was by my dad. At home, as at the factory where for more than half of his life he had been a semi-skilled machine operator, he preferred to communicate with his hands. Yet as his fists whacked into my face I thought, then as now, how right he was to do what he was doing ...”