“... one or two people in the audience mew to themselves. He would also appreciate something my mother said. My brother had gone to Athens. She was asked where he was but could not remember. ‘It begins with an A,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know. Abroad.’ I am abroad writing this in another place beginning with A, America. He ...”

“... it all look a lifetime later? The returning Wolf Cub met a dignitary whose proud visiting card said ‘Rajah Jan-Alam, Sherqulah Punial, Where Heaven and Earth Meet’. The old family bungalow in Gilgit was now occupied by a general but as he was absent there was no obstacle, other than two nervous guards, to prevent a quick snoop round. The same plants ...”

“... were the target. We bought it.   Back in New York we showed the picture to Panofsky and he said it was of the ‘School of Arcimboldo’. When Alfred did the Surrealism show, he put in a lot of peculiar and enigmatic pictures from previous centuries to accelerate the public’s acceptance of Surrealism. The most important thing about the pictures of ...”

“... He was 76; I was 23. I was unmarried; he had just married again. This may be significant. I said goodbye, and he enclosed my forearm with a huge hand of undiminished grip. Without looking at me, he said: ‘Wenn der Putz steht, liegt der Seichel indrehd!’ In other words, which you may possibly need: ‘When the cock ...”

“... Byron’s mistress, not on Milord, but on Shelley during that last summer:     It was said that in his adolescence he was good-looking – but now he was no longer so. His features were delicate but not regular – except for his mouth which however was not good when he laughed, and was a little spoiled by his teeth ... He was also extraordinary ...”

“... Road, Chelsea’ without adding for the benefit of pilgrims that, although The Vale is often said to have been a cul-de-sac in the Nineties, it hasn’t been one for (at the estimate of an erudite present-day resident, Sir Edward Playfair) the last six or seven decades. More than human influence is at work, however, in ...”

“... Commonwealth as of little more than sentimental value. But there are those who suspect that, had Edward Heath shown more enthusiasm and a more comradely spirit at those Commonwealth Conferences over which he presided as premier, things might have turned out differently. Nevertheless, it is no small matter that, although wars between members of the ...”

“... knew their limitations. After being absorbed into the art-world mainstream, under the patronage of Edward Steichen, he began to make a play of them. One page of Naked City (1945), his first collection, displays a pure black rectangle. A reproduction of a fully developed sheet of blank photographic stock, it is captioned: ‘This is unexposed film of Greenwich ...”

“... the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path. But the task of confronting said lion is not at all easy or simple: by no means as much as the preceding paragraphs may have made it appear. True, he was simultaneously pompous and dishonest in the face of a long moral crisis where his views and his connections could have made a ...”

“... while I was still working on my thesis, I’d had an unsuccessful interview in Washington with Edward Teller, who was recruiting for Livermore. He made an odd comment about preferring physics to politics. It was only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know ...”

“... next day. When we asked him about his ability to sleep so well under the circumstances, Snowden said that he felt profoundly at peace with what he had done and so the nights were easy. ‘I figure I have very few days left with a comfortable pillow,’ he joked, ‘so I might as well enjoy them.’ Glenn Greenwald​ expresses his bafflement and the reader ...”

“... In her introductory essay, Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre juxtapositions of Max Ernst’s collage illustrations – much of what is here was ...”

“... whose handsomely-produced list seemed ubiquitous in the north and also quite affordable. ‘Ah,’ said my host, ‘but X is only worried about where his next Chinese carry-out is coming from,’ We cultivate literature on a little Egg Foo Yong? It seems we do. Later the London publisher, now ingested by the statutory multinational, required a reprint, and I ...”

“... hard that ‘one deviation from chastity should so absolutely ruin a young woman.’ Not at all, said Johnson. ‘It is the great principle she is taught. When she has given up that principle she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue.’ Like Eve before her, she has by one wicked act disordered the entire fabric of social happiness and ...”

“... working on Ti Amo, six months before he died, it wasn’t with a novel in mind. (Ørstavik has said that she considers her book a ‘report from a moment in time’ and that it was her publisher who designated it as fiction; Norway doesn’t have a strong tradition of literary memoir.) With its day-by-day accounting of caregiving and anxiety, Ti Amo ...”