“... iconoclasts have done, is to signal an intention to debunk it even before the first snickery little anecdote has been laid on the page. But it is not quite so ill-founded as the blatant hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by Professor Fussell and his precursors may make it appear. For it rests on an underlying assumption that ...”

“... out of date. But this has yet to be demonstrated, for the old whale is quite content to absorb a little Marxism or a little Thatcherism into his giant belly. So long as Whiggery – or social democracy, as we now call it – remains the working language of British politics, it will also remain the most viable language for ...”

“... another chapter in the “God-that-failed” saga’. That, I think, is unfair. Unlike Arthur Koestler, Camus was not performing a public autocritique of his past as a Communist, but trying to put utopian politics in its place. ‘Politics,’ he insisted, ‘is not a religion; if it becomes one it becomes an inquisition.’ Only those who believe ...”

“... novels, RPF (Real Person Fiction). Geraldine Brooks’s March, a novel which sees the events of Little Women from the perspective of the girls’ father, and which won the Pulitzer Prize? Faaan fiction.Fan fiction gave me hours of free entertainment, repetitive strain injury and an introduction to new worlds (it’s where I first read about Sherlock Holmes ...”

“... didn’t see the real Los Angeles until 1965. But to him the city was a myth as powerful as King Arthur. ‘I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset in time to see the sun sink into the Pacific … I spent my time driving aimlessly around the freeways. It was concrete over sand. The anguish of lost souls … The people had lost their ...”

“... Webbs’ variety and that imperialist collectivism represented by Joseph Chamberlain. Yet he had little viable or credible to offer as an alternative – at most, a vague romanticism about ‘feudalism’, as supposedly incarnated in the English country gentleman, and an equally vague notion (perhaps this came a ...”

“... pages written at the statutory 250 words every quarter of an hour. Trollope seems to have relied little on written memoranda to aid composition, believing as he did that it is ‘harder to think of a novel than to write it’. Having thought through his narrative, what followed was relatively plain sailing. By contrast, Charles Reade was the most ...”

“... colleague Tommaso Caccini, and the Florentine philosopher Lodovico delle Colombe. According to Arthur Koestler, however, Galileo was the victim of his own fatal flaws: ‘vanity, jealousy and self-righteousness combined into a demoniac force which drove him to the brink of self-destruction’. According to Stillman Drake, who has devoted a lifetime of ...”

“... like his friend Ryan, whose wife is ‘perpetually giving birth, the children flying out like little bats from under her dress’. But when he finally works up the courage to buy a place of his own, the foundation collapses almost immediately – ‘cancer of the house’, he says. Then there are the free spirits, equally impressive. Hired by Roland Joffe ...”

“... groups at which women friends swapped complaints about men behaving badly in toilets, and little better in kitchens. She likes her men to be ‘dishcloth-literate’, a state of grace to which few attain. She is familiar with the sort of household in which the wife washes only her own dishes, leaving her husband to wash his, when the fancy takes ...”

“... novel, all the good Christians on a 747 to London are suddenly transported to Heaven, leaving little piles of clothes and uneaten lasagna behind them. The same happens all over the planet. Call it the Rapture or the Rip-Off: Stephen King had done the disappearing passenger thing in ‘The Langoliers’ in 1990. But why should the devil have all the good ...”

“... Her lie-down seems to have done her good. There’s a spring in her step . . . though she seems a little peeved. MISS PLUNKETT: Yes. You’re sitting in her chair. MR MORTIMER: I’d better push off. (He goes) MISS PLUNKETT: (In an entirely different voice) Damn. Damn. Damn. A few days later. MR MORTIMER: Ah, Miss Plunkett. We meet again. Did you enjoy the ...”

“... notes, to find that Yeats’s Via Americhe has changed its name, like much in Rapallo. Even the little boulevard by the beach, where Yeats watched Pound feeding the stray local cats, is now called Via Gramsci, which would please neither poet’s ghost. And though there are plaques on all the apartments that housed the resident luminaries, nothing adorns 12 ...”

“... the League, too. Its Secretary-General was Sir Eric Drummond; the President of the Conference was Arthur Henderson. Kennedy’s special concern was to see how Germany could be restored to a safe level of defensive military capability within the framework of the universal disarmament that Versailles had promised. In those early months, ignorance about Hitler ...”

“... have preached, are supposed to have been masters of a profitable trade route in spices, there is little or no good evidence for this spice route in the seventh century and Mecca would not have been well placed to control it in any case. Moreover, though the Quraysh and other Arab tribes are supposed to have been pagans, if one reads the Koran carefully there ...”