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“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... as are the arrows      Of that silver sphereWhose intense lamp narrows      In the white dawn clear,Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.‘I should be grateful for any explanation of this stanza’, Eliot said.Until now I am still ignorant to what sphere Shelley refers, or why it should have silver arrows, or what the devil he means ...”

“... who finds a blood clot while changing her baby: ‘what is this thing, startling against the white diaper, like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow?’ The baby is rushed to the hospital (‘Such pleasingly instant service! Just say “blood”. Just say “diaper”. Look what you get!’), where a scan reveals that he has a malignant tumour on his left ...”

“... Inside, under a glass cover, was the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, two years dead, dressed in a white suit. US troops never found the heavily guarded site, although once, by chance, they landed nearby. A North Vietnamese general told the team from Moscow that if the Americans ever captured the body, Hanoi would be prepared to give all up its US POWs to get ...”

“... Mesopotamian mother goddess. Evans’s theory was popularised by Robert Graves, who published The White Goddess in 1948, followed a year later by Seven Days in New Crete, a novel set in a matriarchal religious utopia. In the early 1950s the modern religion of Wicca, introduced by the retired civil servant Gerald Gardner, took the Great Mother as its principal ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... a scholarship to Cambridge. Still, they have plenty in common. They take turns kissing a George Michael poster, read Jackie Collins’s bonkbusters and fancy the same bad boy, Hammad.Shamsie makes clear from the start that the girls belong to different parts of Karachi’s upper middle class. Extreme wealth buffers the Khans’ experience of everyday ...”

“... greatness. They have been performed magnificently by, for example, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and the White Stripes. Then there was Donovan, a bit like Dan Bern without the sense of humour, or the critical distance. A.J. Weberman, self-styled Dylanologist, burrowed into the singer’s rubbish bins to try to make sense of him. And countless others have applied ...”

“... tends to blunt the special and original thrust of the book, that 3000-mile voyage of the great white birds. Fiennes often meets them en route, of course. He arrives at Sand Lake in northern South Dakota on the same day as 340,000 snow geese. He sees them flying in from the south ‘in long skeins and echelons that crossed and undulated, or appeared, by a ...”

“... fantasy of racial degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive attacking football. The triumph’n ...”

“... notion of him at Number Ten has much the same surrealist feel as the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House ... If Labour is serious about winning, Kinnock has to go.’ This was truth-telling with a vengeance. Since, Johnson concluded, the British electorate were used to authority-figures with an Oxbridge background the Labour Party could do worse than ...”

“... Britain into Europe’ had a public relations problem. Is that still the case? Are Hugh Thomas and Michael Heseltine right in arguing that Britain’s leaders are now lagging behind public opinion in Europeanism or, at the very least, that they are failing in their duty to enthuse us? That two Conservative public figures should, within a space of three ...”

“... In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her ...”

“... His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer. The post found for him was that of junior aide to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. Within two years, as a sort of legal odd-jobs man, he had been deputed to raise the Union Jack for the first time ...”

“... dislike (not envy) of Graham Greene, on these grounds, emerges in a couplet from Byrne: And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen, In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. Greene achieved a bogus newness, in Burgess’s view, by laboriously making grace and sin the novelties of a kind of fiction which was no more than the old sentimental sensationalism ...”