“... for the blandishments of the bankers and borrow disastrously in the Seventies? Part of the answer may be that the country was a democracy, with a functioning Congress that had to approve all loans. I spoke of ‘relatively good management’. By what criteria? It is conservative, consistent, predictable. Its critics say that it is too parochial and too ...”

“... on it – which includes trying to describe it, as I have done – draws out meanings which may be latent in it or in the dweller. Wasps and water, cleanness and death, hygiene and poison: no doubt an imaginative system of associations has been insidiously formed. The person who has been thrown off-balance by some traumatic event might feel ...”

“... or a source of serious knowledge. The new methods of teacher-training instituted in the Sixties may also have helped to make historians uncertain about their subject. Under the PGCE, the graduate qualification required for those taking up posts in secondary schools, teachers were encouraged to think of themselves as ‘educationalists’ rather than ...”

“... of Harold Wilson is that he first embodied and then crushed the hopes of a generation. It may not have been bliss to be alive in October 1964 but, viewed amid the post-Thatcher debris of the Nineties, it does seem an almost unimaginably hopeful starting-point. The Tories were in a state of collapse, not merely politically but culturally: there was no ...”

“... of the rivers. So now, who can gather the gods on your behalf, Gilgamesh, That you too may find eternal life which you seek? For a start, you must not sleep for six days and seven nights.’ Gilgamesh fails this test, but at the suggestion of Ut-napishtim’s wife he is offered a consolation prize. Ut-napishtim describes a plant which brings ...”

“... and proceeded to turn it into ‘a brothel of shame’ and him into a nervous wreck. Whatever may have been Lukács’s need for self-punishment, expiation and redemption, it was this weird experience, typical of the Dostoevsky-dominated decade of the Great War, which brought him into contact with revolutionary politics. As to the disastrous affair ...”

“... it there a minute. For this business about going on one’s way rejoicing, as faithful Spark fans may already have recognised, is one of Muriel Spark’s favourite catch-phrases, along with such classics of the catch-phrase form as ‘crème de la crème’, ‘pisseur de copie’, ‘neither good-looking nor bad-looking’, ‘we must always think about les ...”

“... and hear Allan Border, the Australian skipper, sadly reflecting that the low gate that day ‘may have been caused by events elsewhere in the city’. Meanwhile, people – everywhere but especially in Natal – have been getting killed by the hundred. I’m involved in commissioning opinion surveys and find myself having to worry about our interviewers ...”

“... openness or closed-ness, the drama has drifted away. Ginsberg says that his Collected Poems ‘may be read as a lifelong poem including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves’. But this is disingenuous. He is a very literary poet, even if a line in ‘What would you do if you lost it?’ says: ‘Campion, Creeley, Anacreon, Blake I never read ...”

“... conviction about the problem of individuality, not now in animals so much as in human beings. I may not have heard of Peter Medawar in 1948 but I soon did – in a variety of ways and in a variety of places. My own career as a research scientist quickly faltered: after one year of research at Oxford it was obvious that I lacked that obsessional interest in ...”

“... cheques usually follow. But not long after these happy moments – unreasonably soon, the writer may feel – congratulations fade away and the obvious question begins to appear: ‘What are you working on now?’ Heller, whose big book was slow to reach the stage of unqualified runaway success, learned to dread the obvious question. He had a title for his ...”

“... that Hitler won her over by giving the ‘most thrilling compliments’. Lines such as: ‘May I invite you to the opera, Miss Eva? I am always surrounded by men, you see, so I know very well how much the pleasure of a woman’s company is worth.’ The real attraction seems to have been the chance to cast herself in a starring role at the centre of ...”

“... any kind of pro-German conspiracy. And in her defence, she was no Diana Mosley. Waldorf may have been one of the first in Britain to meet with Hitler face to face, but it was not from any love of National Socialism. Waldorf wrote to the Times to defend the Cliveden house parties and to insist that he and ‘Lady Astor’ were ‘no more ...”

“... Near the end of our time at school, we were addressed by the headmaster (this is my memory, but it may have been some other senior member of staff). It was, I guess, an informal version of a commencement address, a send-off with valedictory ethics. The headmaster, a thoughtful Scot, instructed us in how we should comport ourselves in the world. The Etonian, he ...”

“... but first he should listen without interrupting. Then, as he deciphers the faded ink, a phrase may stand out which reveals the hand that wrote it. He may see – as suddenly as, at a turn of the passage, one comes upon one’s image in a mirror – a living face.This essay was published in its final form in 1984, four ...”