“... had a hard childhood. The family was desperately poor. He developed a curvature of the spine as a small boy and remained undersized and hunch-backed all his life. He was near-sighted, suffered from migraine and later from consumption. Yet like so many poor Italians from that background, he was willing to pay any price for culture. Here is a description of ...”

“... was a dog salon, a defunct beauty parlour advertised with a wolfish yellow and blue portrait. Many small businesses in this quarter were shuttered, signed off in a blizzard of graffiti. The single functioning enterprise offered cushions featuring doggy pin-ups, pert chows and shivering, ratty, handbag things floating above black modernist thrones. Lucky babes ...”

“... salutary, as it makes one realise what a vast place it is – virtually an entire city block and a small town in itself. The late Stuart Burge, the theatre director, was hidden here as an escaped POW in the war, which I took to mean he spent this perilous time in the bosom of the family. Stuart always played this down and now I can see why, as he may well have ...”

“... into the whorl of cloud over the Thames Estuary, to confirm London’s founder membership in the small club of cities which have been attacked by ballistic missiles. London, Paris, Antwerp, Tehran, Tel Aviv and Baghdad: that’s all. If the rocket had been loaded with the nuclear weapon that would justify the expense of the delivery system to military ...”

“... left behind in India. Shortly after they joined him here in 1969 they all moved to Gloucester, a small and unglamorous town known these days as Kwik Save Central. Its main claim to fame is Fred West, whose home I jaunted past to and from school for seven years and which has recently been turned into a memorial garden. My father’s fall from grace was one ...”

“... British friends’ and with an unconscious dismissiveness referred to Northern Ireland as ‘this small corner of the British Commonwealth’. Angered by this diminution, Paisley retorted: ‘To Our Lord, puppet politicians are but grasshoppers with portfolios.’ Like any republican he refused, in one of his favourite phrases, to ‘bow the knee’ to the ...”

“... in 1663 when he was in prison, Bunyan says: The doctrine of the gospel is like the dew and the small rain that distilleth upon the tender grass, wherewith it doth flourish, and is kept green. Christians are like the several flowers in a garden that have upon each of them the dew of heaven, which being shaken with the wind, they let fall their dew at each ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... corrective effect of making the (male) reader examine his automatic prejudices. After all, if Stephen Crane who had never heard a shot fired in anger could write The Red Badge of Courage from 30-year-old newspaper reports, why can’t the definitive Vietnam account be written by a sympathetic woman who has listened carefully to a lot of witnesses over a ...”

“... in this context is the ability to detect subtle changes of attitude on the other side, small cracks in the wall of Arab hostility surrounding Israel which might provide an opening for accommodation and peace. As Yehoshafat Harkabi, the outspokenly dovish former head of military intelligence, observed, ‘knowing your enemy’ must include the ...”

“... culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and times. Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s style ...”

“... 15 billion light-years across, and hardly anybody in it at all, except on the surface of a small planet near the edge of an inconsequential galaxy – and some of them were hairdressers.The faith in a populated universe is an old one. Lucretius introduced the notion of panspermia – the interplanetary diffusion of life by means of germs carried by ...”

“... I always saw those bull-necked fat pigs – like Georg Grosz’s pictures – attacking the small, childlike Vietnamese.’ This was a sort of ‘anti-racist’ response. Another American says: ‘Ours was the sane response. One of total outrage. Not to be outraged was more insane than to be outraged and go bananas.’ This reckless willingness to go ...”

“... two of the city’s homeless street boys who are also chance witnesses to the violence. Certain small details echo, rather inconsequentially, through the three sections: each begins with a reference to colour; a cat, killed by the gangsters, is later discovered by the street boys, who also puncture the tyres on the car driven by Rosa’s husband. But what ...”

“... expression of this view occurred in a recent letter to the London Review of Books. Its writer, Mr Stephen Logan, elegantly transforms Eliot’s parenthetic observation that ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent’ into a pronouncement that intelligence is ‘largely a matter of perceiving the disabling restrictions of method’. I doubt whether ...”