“... reality, it’s rarely like that. For me, a particular moment of ignition happened in 1972, when Francis Steegmuller published Flaubert in Egypt, a compilation from letters and journals of Flaubert’s trip to the Middle East in 1849-50 with his friend Maxime Du Camp. It was here that I first became consciously aware of Flaubert’s unmediated personality ...”

“... is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such ...”

“... No lie, no British participation in the invasion. Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that ...”

“... his ears, and eyes wide open behind his pince-nez. He is evidently still drunk. Like so many young ruined Parisians before him he’d fallen in with a dodgy Spanish poet – J.P. Contamine de Latour, real name José Maria Vicente Ferrer Francisco de Paola Patricio Manuel Contamine, from Tarragona. Years later, Latour managed to piece together the ...”

“... like it: they hadn’t, but in another way they had, if they had seen Poussin’s Blind Orion. Francis Chantrey​ , the sculptor, is supposed to have rubbed his hands in front of Turner’s blazing suns as if his friend’s pictures radiated the heat of glowing embers. Turner asked Chantrey to bury him wrapped in one of his sun pictures to keep his dead ...”

“... figure, though less so than that strange mixture of villainy and conscience Philip (Junius) Francis, who aided Burke in the indictment, possibly out of repentance, and attended his funeral in 1797; he was a true sociopath, here unforgettably described in the most remarkable secondary portrait in the book. Seven years of great oratory before an ...”

“... stop a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the ...”

“... certainly did not meet with universal acceptance. ‘The income tax,’ thundered the radical MP Francis Burdett, has created an inquisitorial power of the most partial, offensive and cruel nature. The whole transactions of a life may be inquired into, family affairs laid open, and an Englishman, like a culprit, summoned to attend commissioners, compelled ...”

“... up with. Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather ...”

“... Shah’s betrayal, placed his son, Yakub Shah, on the throne, but he was a weak and intemperate young man who set the Sunni and the Shia clerics at one another’s throats and before long Akbar sent a large expeditionary force, which took Kashmir in the summer of 1588. In the autumn the Emperor came to see the valley’s famous colours for himself.Habba ...”

“... than those made available by the discipline as it is practised every day, in classrooms before young men and young women likely to be indifferent, or in journals whose audience is limited to the other three hundred people in the world who care whether or not Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost. To some extent this ...”

“... this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... with kidneys and livers, a biopsy on a ball is rarely a great idea. The ultrasound was done by two young guys filled with kindness and sympathy. Both seemed fully aware that taking your trousers and underpants down and lying flat on your back and then having some sort of gel poured on your junk before a type of prod begins to zoom around the outside of your ...”

“... cannot look long at Aesop, Mars and Don Juan of Austria without their faces being shadowed by the young rifleman’s in Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda, off to the left, his green jacket and trousers an irresistible punctuation mark in the painting’s wall of browns. And I cannot take stock of the rifleman – his look out of the illusion, his exchange of ...”