“... John Mortimer’s book has a thoroughly misleading title. It is designed to enlist a little pathetic sympathy for someone carried along like a piece of flotsam without the courage or determination to strike out for the shore. It would be difficult – judging from the book itself – to find anyone less shipwrecked than John Mortimer and less likely to pursue this policy if shipwrecked ...”

“... of northern heights, shaggy with forest. There should be deer there, perhaps a mammoth. The fire took hold and warmed them. Soon the group was spreading out and – without regard to colour, sexual preference, age, size or creed – beginning to gather the nuts, berries and tubers and to share them democratically, once more in balance with the environment ...”

“... Some​ of M. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi ...”

“... novel, Joy in the Morning. I continued plugging away at this for exactly two months, when they took us all off in a van to internment. After a few weeks spent in prisons, barracks etc we were dumped down at the lunatic asylum at Tost in Upper Silesia, where it was possible to resume writing and I started a new novel called Money in the Bank ... I had to ...”

“... to Warsaw as a young man Singer promised his father ‘that I would conduct myself as a Jew.’ He took a mistress, admittedly a Jewish one, twice as old as himself, and adopted all sorts of goy ways. Polish girls were amused by him and admired his red hair and blue eyes. Even the army sergeants were fairly good-natured when he had to present himself as a ...”

“... I were really tired of you I wouldn’t tell you.’    ‘Then why do you tell me?’ I took it up, hungering for something positive, however small.    ‘I don’t always say what I think,’ was the answer. We walked on.    ‘We are leaving in any case,’ she said. It is deceptively simple, but oddly effective in conveying the fact ...”

“... is ultimately what matters, and how rare it is for a critic to admit this. Ida, incidentally, I took at first to be a friend of the family, but she turned out to be a devout Catholic German – Ida Frederike Görres – whose diaries and letters of the Fifties, Broken Lights, were published by Burns and Oates. Toynbee disliked her inbred Catholicism but ...”

“... career, he wasn’t a team player.’ All the same, he still walks the corridors of power: ‘He took on such assignments as pleased the operator in him, the behind-the-scenes Teddy Regler: in the Persian Gulf, with a Japanese whiskey firm looking for a South American market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised ...”

“... and commoditised society, and prepared the nation for the great leap forward that the economy took in the 1780s. The consequences of this transformation were everywhere to be seen. Greater prosperity for nearly all classes, albeit unevenly distributed, led to the production and purchase of more consumer goods, to more entertainment and recreation, and to ...”

“... That project failed, because it could only be used between humans, about topics that humans took an interest in: now, with computers to commune with, just such languages have had to be devised. Is that how Turing’s scientist must talk and think, totally impervious to poetry, puns or passion? Formal computer languages certainly affect our attitude to ...”

“... of bread would undergo a fission chain reaction of devastating power. Historical determinism then took him to Los Alamos – and into the domain of these other books. There they all were, some of the best academic physicists in the world, plonked down in a mushrooming encampment in the wilds of New Mexico and told to make an atom bomb. The recollections of ...”

“... by the scholastic theologians who followed Abelard, and became a dogma with the humanists who took over from them in the Renaissance. The reformed Abelard may figure as the author, in the West, of the idea that Christianity is a spiritual, not a social, faith and religion. To that degree he was out-Bernarding St Bernard and out-Hildebranding the Gregorian ...”

“... restored to all its members, would such symptoms of social disease be eradicated. Emile Durkheim took account of neither Peuchet nor Marx in his celebrated Suicide of 1897, a chilly work which claimed to document ‘social facts’ without needing to recount the feelings of the individuals concerned. He broke suicides down into ‘egotistic’ and ...”

“... it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ostentation and epicureanism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by ‘unmanly ...”

“... by activity the imaginary debt they had contracted by not being proletarians. In 1959 Althusser took more decisive action. He brought together a group of philosophers, in the Salle des Actes of the Ecole Normale, and proposed a collective work on Marx. His project was for a long and exhaustive analysis of the principal Marxist texts, an analysis which would ...”