“... Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain, the former American basketball player, has three distinct claims to fame. First, there is the basketball, of which modest art he was, as his nickname suggests, a preternaturally gifted exponent. Then there is his much repeated claim to have slept with over ten thousand women during the course of his playing career, a boast which has generated fascination, disapproval and scepticism in equal measure, and transformed him, if such a thing is possible, into the Georges Simenon of the American locker-room, the object of a whole new kind of attention ...”

“... The principal city of Turkish Kurdistan is Diyarbakir, a bustling place that in the last fifty years has overflowed its magnificently forbidding basalt walls. These dramatic fortifications – built following the town’s capture by the great Saljuq Malik Shah in 1088 – remain uncluttered and defiant on the southern side: their dark ramparts can be seen from miles away ...”

“... Eight years ago, at Buaile nam Bodach on Barra, the landlady at the B&B had said, ‘My great-aunt was cleared from Pabbay’ – the next island but two to the south, the third-last joint in the backbone of ‘the Long Island’ of the Outer Hebrides. I was researching my book On the Crofters’ Trail at the time, collecting from people whatever their grand or great-grandparents had told them about the High-land Clearances, when landlords desperate to increase the income from their land forced many thousands of small tenants from their homes by a mixture of bribery, threats and the torching of their thatch, their roof-timbers and their looms ...”

“... In New York the Museum of Modern Art’s Pollock exhibition was thrilling in the manner of a saga. With exhilarating force it told the incident-packed story of an inspired and inspiring career cut off at 44 by a self-destructive death. It showed what confusion there was in the early development of a young artist of limited talent and uncertain direction ...”

“... Among the many things that changed after 11 September was the policy on obituaries in the New York Times. Since the attack on the World Trade Center, the newspaper has been printing fifteen or so brief remembrances a day of some of the approximately five thousand people who died in the towers, in the planes and during the rescue efforts. The leaders of corporations and other more or less public figures who are ordinarily assured a place on the obituary page continue to appear there ...”

“... Post-Modernism entered the public mind as a fast-value currency in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the field of architecture, where its association with gimmicky tropes of visual play (the logo-in-the-sky of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the phonejack-in-the-sky of the AT–T Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose ...”

“... Art dealers are promising subjects for biographies. They buy and sell portable objects that can easily cost more than a castle or two. They survive by outwitting some of the world’s most cunning and ruthless manipulators of wealth, and they also know how to charm the old rich, key sources of supply. When they deal in the work of living artists they shape the careers of some of the most charismatic and paranoid individuals of their time ...”

“... Like many millions​ of people, I usually begin my morning doing a few gentle word puzzles on newspaper websites: Connections and Strands in the New York Times, Polygon and Codeword in the Times, plus a couple of others. I do it strictly by the clock so it doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and I don’t take it very seriously – I have till now resisted the endless offers to pay for a subscription that would allow me to track my scores, share my results and compare my performance with that of others ...”

“... Istill​ remember the moment on Brexit referendum night when it became clear that the result was only going one way. It was about 2 a.m. and although many votes were still to be counted, Vince Cable, talking to Emily Maitlis on the BBC, accepted that the British people had decided to leave the European Union. No one else had dared to say it, but if the Lib Dems were prepared to call it then it was time to face facts ...”

“... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...”

“... in the war included – alongside Mitterrand – Pinochet, King Hussein of Jordan and David Owen of the SDP. (Owen seems to have been one of the surprisingly large number of men who found Thatcher intensely sexually desirable. Moore reports him telling the TV interviewer Brian Walden, off the record: ‘The whiff of that perfume, the sweet smell ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... to dictate ‘situation reports’, the teletext having jammed ‘temporarily’, according to David in the ‘ops’ room. I thought, perhaps, that with all the bad news, it had simply shown some human feeling and committed suicide. St George’s Day was my 28th birthday. This meant that my salary increased by one increment on the Assistant Governor grade ...”

“... The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use ...”

“... Scottish nationhood never quite dies but hibernates, latent in all those millions of people and thousands of texts, ready to be potentiated by various events, some more accountable or predictable than others: the Union of the Parliaments (1707), the Scottish Renaissance embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977 ...”