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“... 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 ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... that Cuban identity rests on identification with the United States. For Pérez, becoming Cuban means becoming like an American (he prefers to say ‘North American’, though in Cuban usage an American from the US is less often a norteamericano than a plain americano, as in the revolutionary song that goes: ‘Fidel, Fidel, ¿qué tiene Fidel?/Que los ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... the last years before the war’ – the First War – ‘one of the most magnificent and popular means of satisfying this queer need’ for a displeasure-image ‘was Prussian Germany’. Within ten years of the publication of Musil’s words, Jewry and Germany had furnished the world with displeasure-images of monstrous proportions, exploited to justify the ...”

“... successes. The ‘Welsh windbag’ label, though containing a large grain of truth, is by no means the whole truth. Kinnock has much improved the Party’s policy-making apparatus, streamlined its campaign machine, and made a stab at dragging its image into the second half of the 20th century (hence the red rose in place of the red flag). He worked ...”

“... Ruskin was Britain’s most distinguished aesthete, travelling to Switzerland (on private means) to admire and paint the Alps from a distance. Muir worked in the Sierra (as shepherd, sawyer and fruit farmer), he explored them for many years on end, and the richness of his writing roots deeper into the terrain than any other wilderness writer known to ...”