“... entered the land of the Inquisition. As in all other inquisitions, the sun remained neutral. It rose and its light illuminated balconies decorated with Nazi banners. It was the Führer’s 47th birthday. I forgot to mention that all this occurred during the intermediary days of Passover. I don’t recall if we rode the same train the whole way or if we ...”

“... and fight.’ When the police fired the first volley of tear gas, three white columns of smoke rose, and drifted silently across the square. Then the smell hit and kicked hard, somewhere between nostrils, eyes and stomach. A small woman in her mid-fifties leaned back against a bus stop outside a brothel, calmly smoking. Two young men sat on the pavement ...”

“... After a brilliant academic start – he became professor of Greek at Sydney in 1937 aged 25 – he rose in the war to the rank of brigadier without ever seeing action (something about which he always felt guilty). In 1945, he voted Labour as a protest against Appeasement. In 1950, he became a Tory MP. By 1955, he was a junior Treasury minister. In 1958, he ...”

“... Catholicism with the actual Church.The artistic re-envisioning of Catholicism really began in France. Its Decadents offered a more attractive model for writers and artists than John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, that solemn tale of backing out of one spiritual cul-de-sac after another. The Decadents likened the Mass to Wagner’s operas as a ...”

“... a year before the old life so shockingly blew away – I made a long-contemplated trip to France and Belgium to see the cemeteries of the First World War. My quest, though transatlantic, was a modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of ...”

“... home at most eight or nine times a year. Generally he returned from London well after midnight. He rose after a breakfast in bed of stewed apple, toast melba, tea, a glass of hot water and some pills, and left the house briskly at 8.20. His face was delicately shaved, he selected his overcoat with great care, put one arm in the sleeve, shook the coat up onto ...”

“... under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the position of the USA ...”

“... blood. Robert McBride, sentenced to death by the apartheid regime’s security-judicial system, rose to high office in the security-judicial system of post-apartheid South Africa; at least some of the people who lost loved ones in the attack have not forgiven him. Walter treats South Africa as a paradigm of the way civil wars should be headed off. In her ...”

“... and from there to Vassar College. When she graduated, she moved to New York, and travelled in France and Italy. From 1938 she spent ten years in Key West, Florida. In 1942 she met, in New York, a Brazilian, Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares, and beginning in 1951, they shared a house near Petropolis in Brazil, and an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Bishop ...”

“... absurd and unpalatable choices. Sometimes they are old men and sometimes not. How many people in France felt happy at having to choose between Chirac and Le Pen in 2002? Or in Britain between Johnson and Corbyn in 2019? National elections are quirky events and their vagaries rarely fit into a neat pattern. It is possible that the next US presidential ...”

“... necessarily defective consciousness, or giving it a shape like an hourglass, like James or Anatole France. Where, if not to James, could Forster have looked for a serviceable theory of fiction? Certainly not to Lubbock. In fact there was not, at the time, much of that kind of thing to be had. Since then, the situation has altered amazingly: 1969 is given as ...”

“... at the turn of the century, after initially joining with Daniel Halévy to secure Anatole France’s support of Zola, Proust never published a line of his own in support of Dreyfus, and later deplored the vote of the Chamber affirming Dreyfus’s innocence as unnecessarily divisive. On the other hand, he sprang into print to attack measures against ...”

“... tug at Akerman’s skirt to stop an argument from breaking out.In her native Belgium and adopted France, distribution for Akerman’s films was never certain. Recognition came from a few appreciative programmers, cinephiles and critics. Cahiers du cinéma was slow off the mark, fluffing its first interview with Akerman (a faulty tape recorder) and dismissing ...”

“... not just before his illness as in the play, but it is certainly true, as the King remarks, that in France she would not have got off so lightly. As it was, she lived on in Bedlam long after the witnesses to her deed were dead, surviving until the eve of the accession of George III’s granddaughter, Queen Victoria. I thought I had invented Fitzroy but discover ...”

“... between the lofty and the very small – as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad. Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr Gradgrind’s side, his common sense – a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now ...”