“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... students loved him. Modern critics – especially Scottish ones – have been less impressed. For David Daiches, Wilson is an ‘absolute impostor’ and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... from the information desk. It reads: ‘The gallery’s displays have recently been changed, which means you can view works from the Tate collection in exciting new ways.’ New ways? Blue spectacles? Upside down? The notion that curatorial skill in rearranging the stamp album will alter your view of the Cubist painting you have always known and want to see ...”

“... In these sittings it happens to be me, but for Julia Auerbach, Jake Auerbach, Catherine Lampert, David Landau (and the predecessors, most notably Gerda, Estella Olive West and Juliet Yardley Mills) – for all of us – the role is practically the same. We are there to enable him to perform. We keep him occupied. Drawing is the concern. Drawing voluminously ...”

“... bookshop’) channels of communication. Mann’s deadpan datum – ‘the book as means of communication’ – usefully plays down the mystical, bibliophiliac ‘books are different’ ethos in which the subject is usually discussed by ‘bookmen’. There are no Miltonic genuflections here to books as the noblest products of the human ...”

“... paragraphs and obliquely-titled chapters, is so ‘free’ partly because it is a book, its ‘means of production’ just a pen and paper. After the frustration of three unmade Hollywood scripts, the disastrous hackings-down of Que viva Mexico! by its cinematically ignorant and over-suspicious producer Upton Sinclair, the disapproval of Stalin and ‘the ...”

“... its inhabitants have frequently been massacred. Round about 1000 BC, the city was captured by King David. Assuming that he existed – and there is no archaeological or other evidence for him, or for Solomon, Moses or Joshua, outside the Bible, the relevant books of which were written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe – ...”

“... been since it was annexed by Israel in 1967 – are entitled by international law to resist by any means possible. Besides, two of the oldest and greatest Muslim shrines in the world, dating back a millennium and a half, are supposed by archaeologists to have been built on the site of the Temple Mount – a convergence of religious topoi that a provocative ...”

“... of this volume weightily testify. For clearly we care about falsehood, not intrinsically, but as a means to truth. Does Popper’s programme make the truth any less elusive? Arguments have raged about this for many years, and much of the book is devoted to a defence of his programme against attacks which, he acknowledges, come in varied and subtle forms. They ...”

“... God was more of a mother than a father, the Curia, it was said, had removed him by the traditional means – the only means open to them. Most of these rumours were not, at first at least, meant to be taken very seriously. The behaviour of the Vatican hierarchy, like that of the Government of Italy, is frequently an object ...”

“... James was a puny child, distinguished by neither athletic nor academic prowess. His brother David was his mother’s favourite. Tall, handsome, destined for university and eventually the ministry, he was killed in a skating accident shortly before his 14th birthday. He was not the only child that Margaret had lost. But this time she was ...”

“... of Dickensian horror: to Oliver Twist, fed on the scraps that the Sowerberrys’ dog refused; to David Copperfield, beaten by the fiendish Murdstones; to the little half-starved Marchioness, kept in a dungeon by Sally Brass; to the Nicklebys and Nell, driven out into the harsh world. Indeed, orphans are so plentiful in the works of Dickens that it is quite a ...”

“... to the disturbingly evocative: ‘Does a dog lick its wounds? Or is it death, by means of an open sore, that kisses the puppy on the mouth?’ The different voices create a patchwork narrative in which time is malleable, and the facts of the case become slippery. For this, as the opening suggests, is a whodunnit. Six members of the UN ...”