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“... glass eye; the other an empty socket. It was shot on 3 September 1840, which encouraged me in the hope that it might be the bird that accompanied the cream-coloured courser to the museum in 1908; but Geoff checked the records: this is a different hoopoe. I picked it up, nonetheless. How light it seemed; how shrivelled, how ...”

“... is set down in a terse, almost shorthand style, we learn that Forster had been cruel as a cat to Christopher Isherwood the night before, that he had sucked up to Williams in a queenly manner and that, in the opinion of ‘The Bird’ (Vidal’s usual term for Tennessee’s person of plumage and flutter), he was an old gentleman ‘with urinestained ...”

“... Be. Silly,’ plummy King Henry writes at one point, reprising a line from one of Christopher Hitchens’s voluminous replies to Koba the Dread. And sometimes there’s a flash of the old comic vigour, oddly transformed by creeping fogeyism. Here’s the narrator’s description of the strangely dressed young women observed by Xan as he passes ...”

“... Not long after, the discussion group was disbanded. The gatecrasher’s name, we learnt, was Christopher Hitchens, and he apparently did this sort of thing rather often, being famous for a sort of pyrotechnic brashness. Looking back, one realises that these were entirely apposite qualities for the successful journalist, which is very much what Hitchens ...”

“... critique is underlaid with strict moral sense. You cannot, he seems to say, eat the seed corn and hope to prosper. Without thrift and continence and thought for the morrow there is no firm foundation. Yet could this not be Thatcher herself talking? There is a fashion among social democrats for the expression of this paradox in its reverse form – in other ...”

“... under caution, and there is still a chance that Blair will be too. When it was revealed that Sir Christopher Evans, the venture capitalist founder of Merlin Biosciences, had been arrested and questioned about his £1 million loan before the 2005 election, he said: ‘The reason I made the loan was precisely because I was not prepared to make such a ...”

“... I replied that, well, she’d done far more to undermine the House of Windsor than I could ever hope to do. If this is an instance of ‘the cunning of history’ then at least for once it isn’t at my expense, or the expense of my side. So I appear to have talked my way into it, in spite of everything and in spite of what I prided myself in thinking of as ...”

“... found in Leonard Bernstein’s naive philanthropy. He now has the America he always wanted, and I hope it stays fine for ...”

“... that it doesn’t rule out the possibility of more fiction from Hemon, and, in a couple of senses, hope for the ...”

“... they have been lacking in the art of measurement as well as perspective and the like. One may well hope that when they acquire this knowledge as well and so combine practice and theory, they will in time take second place to no other nation. Dürer imagined the ideal as something that smoothed out the irregularities of experience. Landscape, however, seems to ...”

“... advertisements. No one lives in this carefully edited place, but it is full of people. I think (I hope) upbeat enjoyments of the tourist city are still possible – more possible, and more permissible, than Christopher Prendergast suggests – and they are surely more appealing than the glum romanticising of awfulness by ...”

“... of comparative philology. This cardinal fact about him comes forcibly home in a letter to his son Christopher dated 21 February 1958. Christopher had read a paper to a college society on the heroes of Northern legend as seen in different fashion by Germanic poets and Roman writers. His father, having heard the paper, went ...”

“... end, the book, too, suffers a contraction, and like the preceding novels it offers a glimpse of hope such as compounds the poignancy since such hope is so desperately akin to hopefulness.  The world seemed to be narrowing down to its simplest dimensions: breakfast, supper. And if anyone said, I would like – all he had ...”

“... trying and failing to suppress the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the hope of capturing its land and wealth for the British Empire. And so a governing elite that, on balance, regarded the Atlantic slave trade as appalling also felt, on balance, that stopping the trade would be even worse and extending the empire of slavery even ...”

“... that still decorate stations on the Paris Métro. In 1808, he invaded the Iberian peninsula in the hope of forcing Britain into economic isolation. In 1812, he launched a disastrous invasion of Russia. Only in 1813-14 was he pushed out of Germany by the Sixth Coalition, driven back into France and exiled to the island of Elba. Having escaped from ...”