“... or Kurt Weill, brittle and easy, wearing their sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long while/From May to December ... ’ Louis Untermeyer, in an enthusiastic letter written in 1926, when The Wild Party was just a naughty manuscript ...”

“... universal humanity of the American ideal. There was anobility about this ideal, however naive it may sound to Europeans, and one strand of American isolationism has always related to it. Nevertheless, the intermingling of this tradition with a naive belief in the Utopian nature of Stalinist Russia produced a great deal of double think and double-talk. It is ...”

“... of individuals, how did it simultaneously give birth to totalitarian ideologies? These questions may be new for anthropologists accustomed to studying remote, non-modern societies, but they are extremely familiar to historians of modern ideas, who may lose patience with Dumont’s somewhat laborious manner. This would be ...”

“... modern shapes. Much of it survives in use at Windsor and if Her Majesty dips into this volume she may be puzzled by the stern tone in which Clive Wainwright endorses Pugin’s ‘quite proper’ renunciation of her ‘horrific’ furniture, most of which is considered too distressing to illustrate. In Dr Wainwright’s disapproval we hear an authentic echo of ...”

“... sentence sound because a sentence he said was a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung which – never not quite iambic though – is ten syllables that hang together – so – just so the way the elephant’s child took seventeen melons (the green crackly kind) and said to all his dear families ‘Goodbye. I am going to the great ...”

“... I was furious at the assumption that my reaction was one of fear. It did not occur to him that I may have been embarrassed for him; that I may have felt shame for him to be sitting there, in front of a black man, telling a story like that. It did not occur to him because he was not ashamed – and that bothered me. It ...”

“... owl of Minerva, finally makes his escape over the border in search of Egalitaria, a land which may prove either a heuristic fiction or a historical possibility. On this wistfully suspended note, the novel shifts out of its satirical register into a genuinely moving conclusion. Caritat, who holds imaginary conversations with Kant and Condorcet, is a liberal ...”

“... owners a useless carcass and empty pockets. I never met any of the unlucky buyers and the story may be apocryphal but it captures the sourness of the time. The city’s reunification brought no reconciliation. The Serbs who fought to live apart triumphed – their people believed that they had to flee from the Muslim-dominated city – and the Muslims and ...”

“... This, for instance, is Grippes’s experience of the événements of the late Sixties: 10 May 1968. Clouds of tear gas. Cars overturned in Paris streets. Grippes’s long-awaited autobiographical novel, Sleeping on the Beach, had appeared the day before. His stoic gloom as he watched students flinging the whole of the first edition onto a bonfire ...”

“... for being in Africa – for being a journalist in Africa – this seemed like one. The world may not have cared about Somalia ... but I could force them to care by rubbing their faces in it every day, by shoving the pictures of starving kids ... in dispatches run regularly on the front page ... Somalia was the prism through which I came to view the rest ...”

“... For the theoretical physicist Lev Landau, cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt. It may be that to dwell too long and too intensely on the nature of the universe or life or consciousness ultimately weakens one’s grip on reality. It is probably unwise to inhale too deeply the fumes that emerge from such centres as the Santa Fe Institute, set up ...”

“... to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, I was struck by the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister ...”

“... the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again and be ...”

“... half the year. But he’s not simply flouting the parish boundaries of PC, in which only a woman may write as a woman, or only a black may address the themes of race. Phillips’s contumaciousness arises from a more philosophical view of identity, which his fictions propose in their ventriloquism and polyphony, without ...”

“... of international law, it seems to me difficult to maintain that the commission of such high crimes may amount to acts performed in the exercise of the functions of a Head of State. The judgment was of fundamental importance, signalling that the most basic human rights are enforceable against anyone, regardless of rules of international law that might otherwise ...”