“... are on their own fact-finding mission to planet Earth. The question is whether the encounter of small with large will reveal anything of interest, or if aliens are merely a version of us, and here a version of elsewhere.Flaubert admired Candide extravagantly (even claiming to have translated it into English) because it showed that the con brio of a story ...”

“... guilt-imbued and looking for art to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and ...”

“... He was born rather higher in the social scale than H.G. Wells, for his father was the manager of a small factory which had been built up, from artisan beginnings, by his own father. The family was quite prosperous, and Carr went to Merchant Taylor’s, where he shone. Even as a child, he was a somewhat unpopular figure, for he did not like fools, and his ...”

“... St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out on the grand scale, as though occupying some other part of the poet’s mind. ‘Again I ...”

“... ennobling effects of liberty. One phrase in Milton’s History of Britain – ‘from obscure and small to grow eminent and glorious commonwealths’ – appears to be taken directly from Sallust’s rendition of a speech by Cato in which he tells the Senate not to ‘suppose that it was by arms that our forefathers raised our republic from obscurity to ...”

“... precedent has been set, and a new regional order has emerged, based on uncontested domination by a small state that continues to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence with impunity, led by a man who is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The war with Iran is far more than an attempt to prevent ...”

“... of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of ...”

“... New Labour alike as an electoral masterstroke, it offered a life-changing fortune to a relatively small group of people, a group that, not by coincidence, contained a large number of swing voters.Right to Buy differed from the period’s other privatisations in many ways. It was tightly linked to the buyer’s personal use of the asset being privatised. If ...”

“... to free up beds that, as Wendy Warren witnessed, porters would rouse patients with dementia in the small hours to rush them off to some part of the county where a community bed had become available. Even after the Royal Infirmary got a new, bigger A&E building in April 2017, at a cost of £48 million, the Warrens found themselves waiting outside it in the back ...”

“... Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would ...”

“... hardly cosy is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in ...”

“... all as far as Brandon’s girlfriends were concerned.’ Indeed it may have been the draw. In the small-town rural America where Teena lived, male crime passed effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and ...”

“... can bullshit the American people, but they can’t bullshit us.’ As many countries pulled their small numbers of troops out of Iraq, I heard the State Department announce it would no longer use the phrase ‘Coalition of the Willing’. I heard that of the 40 water and sewage systems in Iraq, ‘not one is being operated properly.’ I heard that of the 19 ...”

“... the literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was 36 years her senior. And then there is the small matter of incest. Much interest in this was fuelled by incidents in Thomas Mann’s own work. In her useful and sympathetic book about the Mann family, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, Andrea Weiss writes: ‘Just how much Katia and Klaus Pringsheim ...”

“... Mutually Assured Destruction: ‘Even if you’re for Pacifism, you’re a communist. They are so small-minded that they can’t give anyone credit for wanting life and peace even more than world-domination. I get stared at in horror when I suggest that we are as guilty in this as Russia is; that we are warmongers too.’ Legions of teenagers, and not only ...”