“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... with his hawkish American anaesthetist, whose rants about Iraq tend to drive Perowne into the peace camp. But he observes with mild disapproval the levity of the marchers gathering outside: ‘If they think – and they could be right – that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...”

“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... systematic ethics and fiction. This way of doing philosophy, she suggests, fell from favour with David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which sought to explicate the principles underlying human conduct rather than portray instances of virtue or vice in the form of characters. After Hume, the character sketch ‘was no longer considered ...”

“... the world is not easily forgotten: 142 killed in Yemen when two Shia mosques were bombed; 103 peace protesters killed by a suicide bomber in Ankara; 224 blown up on a Metrojet flight to St Petersburg; 131 shot or bombed in the Paris attacks of 2015; 86 run down by a truck in Nice the following year; 593 killed in an operation in the Philippines the year ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.’ I heard the vice president say: ‘I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.’ I heard Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, say: ‘American soldiers will not be received by flowers. They will be received by ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... he needed them for his own protection, he found he couldn’t write another word. There was peace of mind, he felt at first, in this silence, but it was a peace of mind he couldn’t distinguish from emptiness. That was the second stage. Now he realised that what he had to look for was the pure power of ...”

“... writes, an oddly passive wording) and crafty tactician (although the romantic advice he gave David Hare sounds like something from a cut-rate campus Casanova). He also took in troubled lambs gone astray whom he could counsel and Pygmalionise, such as Brigit (a pseudonym). Roth met her when she was still grief-struck over the death of her mother. When at ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was ...”