“... state and, duly beaming, produced a complete, pornographically-detailed scenario. According to Lawrence Wright, the author of Remembering Satan: Recovered Memory and the Shattering of a Family,1 Ingram had always been given to extremes. A disciplinarian to his children, fanatically thrifty, absorbed in his Church; over-zealous in his work, he handed out ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...”

“... thought necessary, apparently sure of a welcome; yet when it appeared – as in James and Ford and Lawrence and Woolf and Joyce, for example – it was met with suspicion. Forster felt the need for change quite strongly. He complained, even as he was trying to finish A Passage to India, that he was ‘bored by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of ...”

“... Hemingway’s favourite translator and the man who first translated Faulkner and Huxley and Lawrence into Spanish when he was living in Madrid and collaborating with Ortega y Gasset on his Revista de Occidente, a review that changed a culture. And Fernando Ortiz, the anthropologist, the man who coined, among others, the word Afro-Cuban (after which ...”

“... unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of little girls.’ ‘Oh,’ said ...”