“... ideas were not innate . . . and that toleration in politics and religion is the glory of civilised man.’ But the Age of Reason itself was ‘dominated by French culture’, and ‘it was by the Philosophes and the encyclopédistes that the thought and taste of the civilised world was formed.’ Voltaire with his sardonic smile was ‘the supreme intellectual ...”

“... Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the Cotton Club, the grandest Harlem venue (it seated more than six hundred), where Ellington performed, before whites only, for the five years from 1927, and in the spring seasons of 1933, 1937 and 1938 ...”

“... bisexual … Nothing but humiliation and degradation at the thought of physical relations with a man.’ Sontag read and reread Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a book she loved for many years, both for its Modernism and its lesbianism. At the campus book exchange, she finally met an arty girl, Harriet Sohmers, several years older than her and superior in one ...”

“... wheat like a girl plaiting her hair, far from Russia’s canals quivering with sunstroke, a man living with English in one room. The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth? Hill, I ...”

“... while the loser fights back, eventually achieving a robust ‘consciousness of self’ (conscience de soi) and attaining full humanity. Kojève adds a pinch of Nietzsche by calling his antagonists ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’, and follows it with a dash of Freud, saying that the slave responds to humiliation by constructing an ‘ego’ or ...”

“... and quite different from narco-terrorism in Columbia, CIA-Contra terrorism in Nicaragua, strong-man terrorism in Panama, or the urban guerrilla terrorism of the Tupamaros. Peru is under siege from a wholly anachronistic but apparently invincible Maoist revolutionary army, Sendero Luminoso – Shining Path. This purist faction sees itself in conflict with ...”

“... loving middle-aged wife to her browsing husband and then to the assistant: ‘He’s a real cheese man.’ Odd how I could take such a place without question did I come across it in New York, say, or California. But here it’s so bound up with class and money and all one’s complicated feelings about England I hold back. Like Saga, another rich and popular ...”

“... a shadowy resemblance between him and Rougue, the hero of one of his own tales reprinted here, a man of catholic tastes who can be found at various times ‘sipping incessantly from a bottle of the most fiery liquers’, drinking ‘a vast drought’ of ‘raw brandy’, ‘be[taking] himself with vast zeal and fervour to the keg of rum’ and swallowing ...”

“... unhappily for Hexter, and not only, as our author claims, because of the work of Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller. I will go so far as to say that the idea of the Renaissance was big enough and strong enough to do without the rejuvenating serum administered to it, with the best of intentions, by these two excellent historians. In fact, it is economic ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”

“... for physical martyrdom, he, with the rest of his countrymen, will work indoors. The house, where man is born, and married, and dies, becomes his theatre, and the sun shines as well, if sometimes more indirectly, on the indoor as on the outdoor man.’ Sickert enjoyed making pronouncements – his most recent ...”

“... King wanted to move palaces, he would not go through Paris, but had a path cut through the Bois de Boulogne, which was known afterwards as ‘the Riot Road’. It would be a stretch of the imagination to say that the events of the spring of 1750 prefigure those of the Revolutionary spring of 1789. But their quality of strangeness, their dark undertow of ...”

“... statement: ‘There is nothing clever or smart about being incomprehensible. The ordinary man in the street has his rights, just as the toffee-nosed élitists in Hampstead have theirs.’Other People was discussed in at least four broadcasts, two on radio (Kaleidoscope, Critics’ Forum), and two on TV (The South Bank Show, Did you see?), the second ...”

“... creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did not anticipate the effects a free-flowing, direct, 24/7 style of communication would have on the quality ...”

“... as a political one, a lifeline to the corporate base of the fraying New Deal coalition: military de-escalation would free up public revenue for productive investment and tamp down the inflationary pressures that scared the bond managers of multinational banks, while the normalisation of international relations would open the USSR, Eastern Europe and China ...”