“... to escape the amorous god of poetry, Apollo. The laurel referred to is the sweet-scented variety we know as the bay tree, hence the joke in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks: ‘Why was Petrarch so madly in love with Laura? Because it tastes so good with sausage and thrush.’ Another wordplay is on l’aura, meaning ‘breeze’ or ‘breath’ and ...”

“... Peter Halket, Schreiner’s fictional trooper, witnesses the hangings. He has raped women in the bush and machine-gunned villages, toppling rows of ‘black men’s heads’ like ‘the corn in sheaves’. When confronted at the campfire by a vision of Jesus, he hides behind his boss. ‘With Cecil it’s all right; you can do what you like … provided that ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... novels, one tale for each decade; Sallis backtracks, flashes forward, feels free to doctor what we think we know. The past is up for permanent revision. Old scabs are picked at until they bleed afresh. Sallis outlined his temporal scheme when he explained to me how the original Lew Griffin novel, The Long Legged ...”

“... belief’. This hardly seems up to the job: if that’s all the word means, the wonder is that we have waited so long for it. When has our understanding of public life not been shaped more by emotion than by ‘objective facts’? When was this golden age of objectivity? Surely not in the time when press lords such as Northcliffe and Beaverbrook liked to ...”

“... things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out ...”

“... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British builders, Dorman ...”

“... which reached him and went down well. The first came when he and his wife Jane went to stay with George Barker, in Italy I think, and Barker exclaimed afterwards: ‘That boy! He’s got a tiger in his loins!’ Karl loved that. Who wouldn’t? His friends all got to hear about it. He laughed about it in a deprecating way but inside I think he felt that ...”

“... your chance/Don’t let anyone mess with your swing.’ He responds gratefully: ‘Brilliant poem. We need a British version of it.’ Brown hopes this picture is enough to give a sense of the unique challenge of being prime minister in the age of 24/7 media communication, facing ‘a weight and breadth of issues that is difficult to comprehend, yet alone ...”

“... little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their literacy by ...”

“... wish I could have been there with you,’ Hardwick replied. ‘Look around for a living place … We’d have to go in September for Harriet’s school.’ On 8 May, Hardwick was still planning to move to London and wrote to Lowell to say that Carlos Fuentes was going to take their apartment on West 67th Street. A week later, after an unsatisfactory phone ...”

“... 3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills ...”

“... you see him write of this scatter-burst of            rock in open sea, ‘We seem brought near that mystery of             mysteries, the first appearance of new beings on the               earth.’The Rambert Dance Company produced a new work, The Comedy of Change, as their ...”

“... The table is full, the wall is painted, the space is filled with voices!’ Zurab was talking. We were in a Mexican-Japanese restaurant in Tbilisi, ending a heavy night. Bottles and dishes crowded the table; the diners were even gaudier than the décor; over the blast of the band came the voice of Georgia’s richest brewer yelling at his bodyguards ...”

“... spokesmen for al-Qaida or as the Islamic equivalent of Monty Python’s People’s Front of Judea? We are here for the official opening of a conference – not a celebration, they are keen to stress – to commemorate the glorious memory of the 19 men who killed themselves in flying four planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the ground. ‘The world is ...”