“... Her sentences were lucid, patient, imagistic. Like her contemporaries Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, she picked a fight with smalltown America. But smalltown America has always forgiven her, because Cather always also wanted to celebrate its positive ideals. Her three great heroes, Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers!, ‘Tony’ Shimerda of My Ántonia ...”

“... Fringe, the man showing it me Bernard Reiss’s nephew. I tell him about the suit, which was in grey Cheviot tweed, the waistcoat of which I still have and which I took to show Mr Hitchcock at Anderson & Sheppard before they made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with ...”

“... is merely a vacant signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail.Conversation typically comes next as a marker. A quarter of A la recherche is made up of dialogue; a half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Speech in Proust is generally ...”

“... Sing Sing. The receiving clerk described him as 5 foot 8½ inches tall, 140 pounds in weight, with grey eyes, brown hair and a sallow complexion. (However, in a passport application in 1914 he is an inch shorter, and his eyes are blue.) His face was ‘full of pimples’ and ‘pitted’ with small scars – the facial lesions associated with secondary ...”

“... old standards on the Gilpin Place piano, with occasional updates, ‘Forgotten Dreams’ by Leroy Anderson, the theme from Limelight, which I give her a few years or so before she dies.But it isn’t death that puts paid to these musical evenings, though when Aunt Eveline dies we inherit her piano and take it home. What takes its place in the smoky ...”

“... still a delight.8 May. A feeling of bereavement in the streets. I shop for supper and unprompted a grey-haired woman in the fish shop bursts out: ‘It means I shall have a Tory government for the rest of my life.’In the library they say: ‘Good morning, though we’ve just been trying to think what’s good about it.’I wanted a Labour government so that ...”

“... hair ... a bad back here, a heavy paunch there’. Sartorially, they are drabbies, ‘awful old grey suits and worse black ties ... or else the ... uniform of the Left on parade, a dark old coat left open to the weather ... corduroy trousers ... Tuf boots’. Acting as MC for the occasion, Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry ...”

“... the directories from two journalists whose identities he had to protect – he nicknamed them Anderson and Farish. Coulson claimed he couldn’t remember any of the emails, but said he didn’t believe that Goodman had actually been paying the police. The jury couldn’t reach a verdict. In Brooks’s case, the police had caught a corrupt ...”

“... pioneering work, Newspapers and Nationalism, in tracing how immediately the insights of Benedict Anderson can be mapped onto the growth and form of Irish nationalist consciousness in imagining a community. But his overall preoccupation is with disunion rather than Union. Though he opens by unearthing D.P. Moran’s 1904 parody of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ...”

“... she calls his ‘romantic connoisseurship of struggle’. In the Guardian (October 1992) Benedict Anderson took issue with Davidson on several counts: that the virtues of armed anti-colonial struggle which he affirmed, especially in Portuguese Africa, were soon undone ‘by Stalinism and one-party bureaucratic dictatorships’; that if the nation-state is ...”

“... dreamed it. As I get older I dream more frequently of that magnificent cathedral – the long grey cool interior hanging somehow like memory itself. These are intense experiences, from which I awake hearing every single note of a piece of remembered music; happy dreams, never troubled. I like returning to that place in my sleep, even look forward to ...”

“... a word, now,’ writes Kerouac, about your wonderful 13,000-word letter about Joan Anderson and Cherry May. I think it ranked among the best things ever written in America ... You gather together all the best styles ... of Joyce, Céline, Dosty – Proust ... and utilise them in the muscular rush of your own narrative style – excitement. I ...”

“... behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world into which the bulk of the human species has been absorbed, before stepping ...”

“... January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s ...”

“... otherness of insects, their fast-burn and utterly alien sense of time. The quotation from Enrique Anderson Imbert at the start of Eye of the Cricket clarifies the quest: ‘Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in the eyes of the cricket.’ Anxiety: that’s the tool with ...”