“... but also possesses the improvisatory variety and boldness of birdsong. He was probably no more licentious in his English than the perpetually rule-breaking Dickens, even if not up to Dickens’s cool overall command of long episodes of linguistic disruption. Gash calls this passage from Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour a piece of ‘straight visual ...”

“... the principles on which he made his choices. All letters to Virginia Woolf are included, which was no doubt to be expected, though they are the only ones in the book that aren’t really worth reading, for they are mostly love letters, and the love letters of this stern and unillusioned figure are as likely as anybody else’s to decline immediately after the ...”

“... for the virtues of swimming, paring his toenails as he lay on his back in mid-Thames. There seemed no limit to man’s ability to defy the natural laws. It was not essential to limit the number of wheels to two, but tricycles and quadricycles were heavy going. A fetching illustration by George Cruikshank, dated 1819, shows two young women, each mounted on a ...”

“... as a result of the worldwide protest that ‘was fired by Bruemmer’s images of the cute pups’. No doubt the concept of cuteness as a criterion for recruiting people to the minority who believe that other creatures have a right to survival on this planet is nauseous to the committed, but if you are involved in green propaganda you have to be flexible and ...”

“... Castle of Otranto is more widely read than the Collected Speeches. Why? Could it be ... No, we won’t go that far. The very suggestion would automatically be labelled slander by the Soviet press. Anyway, it is to the Western reader that this diary is addressed: the author’s forehead is far too tender to try to break through the Iron Curtain. Some ...”

“... British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered sensibility that has put cooks in front of ...”

“... her retirement in ‘a house with many shutters, Venetian blinds and lace curtains so that no one will ever see me and everyone will know my time is done.’ To be a great tart you have to invent yourself, just as Rothschild invented the Baron Philippe, and if you have sufficient aplomb, other people will accept your creation. Milady Vine goes up like ...”

“... up out of the blue to hog the television show you were already feeling nervous about. There is no sense of comeuppance on these occasions, only a view of scuttled dignity, and life getting out of hand. What is enjoyable about the tightrope is not the feat of someone’s walking it or the threat that they might fall, but the possibility of a comic ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... knees wouldn’t bend very much. While my classmates sank deeply, I merely bobbed a bit, dropping no more than a couple of inches. And without a proper plié your centre was all over the place, your leaps had no lift and when you did get off the ground, you landed heavily. That wasn’t, however, as much of a problem as it ...”

“... two opposing drives: the desire to be taken seriously and the desire to be popular, and so it is no surprise that one has served as a vehicle for the other since the American 19th century. English-language detective fiction began with Poe’s pulpy stories of Auguste Dupin, and was definitively sanctified 50 years later by Chesterton, who assimilated the ...”

“... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies ...”

“... for different causes amounts to factionalism and therefore undermines the republic. There is no mention of freedom of assembly in the constitution of the Fifth Republic either. As for the UK, ‘it can hardly be said that our constitution knows of such a thing as any specific right of public meetings,’ the British jurist A.V. Dicey wrote in 1885. The ...”

“... Dundee. Where the Observer’s wider and obviously more up-to-date perspective came from I had no idea; the kind of smart remark that said it was a paper ‘written by Central European Jews for Central African blacks’ would have flown straight over my head. I didn’t know that it had championed the decolonisation of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion ...”