“... 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 ...”

“... the greater the resentment against landlords and their renting and leasing policies. At Kirkby Stephen the main grievance seems to have been London’s inexplicable abolition of the annual St Luke’s Day holiday, putting paid to the local fair which went with it. There was a kind of climax in the siege of Pontefract Castle, one of the few defensible ...”

“... and an ‘unimpressive Oxford college’, while Turner, the Yorkshire-accented interrogator in A Small Town in Germany (1968), is ‘a former fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, which takes all kinds of people’. All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and self-seeking diplomats who notice such things ...”

“... the Czechoslovak to the Hungarian Party. The most that can be claimed is that the Party, though small, had enjoyed considerable sympathy between the wars among artists, writers, university students and other intellectuals. What is especially striking, given Central European anti-semitism, is the relatively high number of Jewish members. (One third of ...”

“... them to market. And the foot and mouth epidemic was wiping out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a ...”

“... which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame and her obsession with ...”

“... Alec Campbell, the former Conservative leader of the council (he lost his seat in May), speak in a small caravan in the middle of the field round the back.The fact that both men voted to stay in the EU cuts no ice on the doorstep. ‘When Remainers see a blue rosette they immediately start shouting at you,’ Duran said. ‘You say, “Wait a minute, I voted ...”

“... board schools), voluntary or ‘aided’ schools (mostly Anglican or Catholic) and a comparatively small number of preparatory schools which ‘prepared’ their students for public school entrance. There were four kinds of secondary school: public, direct-grant (which received state funding from Whitehall on condition that they took a proportion of their ...”

“... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...”

“... one must discriminate. They are trash, husks of people spat out by fate … [How] did that small grey woman come to stand for a quarter of an hour beside me before a shop window while showing me an old, long pencil that protruded with infinite slowness from her filthy, closed hands? I acted as if I were looking at the goods displayed and didn’t ...”

“... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from ...”

“... he was large and clumsy – and his own wish to fight on Frank’s behalf, blinded with tears, small fists flying left and right. Both boys survived; Frank went on to Winchester as a scholar, but Edward was thought to be dim and was dispatched to Kingswood (founder John Wesley), where his father had been. It was an odd time in the public schools, major and ...”

“... In 1948, Gear, then based in Paris, had exhibited with Réalités Nouvelles and, along with Stephen Gilbert, had also become one of only two British founding members of the CoBrA group, whose significance has been aptly characterised by Chris van der Heijden: ‘in the midst of the darkness of the Cold War the colours of CoBrA take on a special ...”

“... fisherfolk of the further coasts of Chiba’ who ‘traditionally worked nude with only a small red ribbon tied around the member lest the goddess Benten, deity of the sea, be offended’. Much of this was a consequence of poverty and ruin, of course, but to Richie it was both erotic and romantic. ‘When you look at naked people one of two things can ...”

“... confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears thirty thousand years or so ago; problems that arise for small populations trying to make a living and to reproduce in an ecology of scarce resources. But, arguably, that kind of mind doesn’t work very well in third millennium Lower Manhattan, where there’s population to spare and a Starbucks on every block, but ...”