“... efforts – Levy’s, but also Updike’s – to understand the boy’s motives. Levy and Updike may be out of touch, but at least they realise it. Terrorist does not presume to explain Ahmad so much as try to get to know him. Acknowledging difference isn’t the same thing as resigning oneself to ignorance. At a time when so much official discourse is ...”

“... and complacent – patronised Ruskin. Dean Liddell of Christ Church was among them (‘He may be a great Drawing-Master, or a great artistic Poet, – as he is – has been, – never anything more. – Voilà mon avis’). Charles Eliot Norton, at Harvard, was another. Those who have read the correspondence between Ruskin and Norton with ...”

“... of art ... seems to be a property or quality that can never be wholly got rid of. However much we may stop mentioning it and try and shame it into leaving, it just keeps on hanging around.’ Chris Ofili, who won the Turner Prize in 1998, is included in this chapter with his sequinned, beaded, dotted, varnished, lustrous, rainbow-coloured paeans in paint to ...”

“... in Tehran. Her son was conceived out of her traitorous relationship with a Russian diplomat, who may or may not have been Mr Ryazanov. Since his mother’s death Dr Spencer has taken a protective interest in the boy, inspiring his study of Persian and perhaps more. John, it becomes clear, came to Iran not as a hippy, but ...”

“... need a political motive. An Israeli who orders the killing of Palestinians must know that this may well be the result. In this case Islamic Jihad has taken responsibility for the action: the personal vendetta became a political act. A political act has political aims. And the aim could only be connected to the fact that – as all the world knows ...”

“... two boobies and a noddy And then they left off eating the dead body. Though the blithe tone may reflect the narrator’s idiocy, it doesn’t stem from heartlessness on Byron’s part. He wants revulsion to come through unsoftened by sentiment. Muldoon’s strategy is similar. The poems in Moy Sand and Gravel don’t differ in kind from his previous ...”

“... own reading of the text that the ninth year (1470) should be, as it is, the correct date. These may seem minor matters, but if we are to be persuaded that Henry VI was regarded as a Fisher King, presiding over a late medieval Waste Land (though it was Edward, as it happens, who died after catching cold on a fishing trip), then we need to be confident of the ...”

“... of his words. Certainly, in everyday speech we allow that on occasion a doctor, for example, may make a mistake. But what qualifies a doctor as a doctor is his medical knowledge. Qua doctor, therefore, no doctor makes mistakes. So it is with rulers: The most precise way to formulate my position is to say that the ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, makes ...”

“... inside, however inert, outside changes remorselessly. So for example, the general election that May was a terrible wrench; an assault on my inwardness. Of course I had to abandon the ‘article’ – editing, cutting or finishing anything about Raphael’s life seemed psychologically impossible. As well as being grateful, I was shocked at how swiftly ...”

“... Ian’s father, went to Eton and Oxford, became a Tory MP, and died a hero on the battlefield in May 1917. Val had two sons, the elder of whom, Peter, b. 1907, inherited the tendency to be a paragon, and the younger of whom, Ian, b. 1908, inevitably became the family handful. Things were not helped by the wills of Val and Robert, which absent-mindedly or ...”

“... of a conversation or a relationship. When Thomsen talks to his dying, same-age aunt (with whom he may or may not have had a relationship), she sounds like his grandmother, because Amis insists on her calling him ‘Golito’ all the time. In English – in Amis – humour is privileged, always. But how to humour – and for ...”

“... Manning Clark’s funeral, on 27 May 1991 at – to the surprise of many – St Christopher’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Canberra, was attended by much of Australia’s ‘progressive’ elite: the governor-general (Bill Hayden), the prime minister (Bob Hawke), the deputy prime minister and future prime minister (Paul Keating), all of them at one time leaders of the Labor Party, along with much of the federal cabinet, the chief justice of the High Court and six hundred others ...”

“... Jonas, was himself rumoured to have been killed in the Libyan desert. So the man in the pub may not be a jihadi at all: he may, in fact, be a pimp, since after a bizarre exchange he refers Shakespeare to his prostitute, Winnie, a.k.a. Melissa. Shakespeare runs off with her, mainly in the hope of discovering whether ...”

“... If anxiety about identity too often stands in for actual drama in his fiction, for some it may be a preferable substitute. Dressing all this up in Raymond Carver’s clothes offers the prospect of an accessible synthesis. Of the collection’s title story, Schiff said: ‘Here Englander may just surpass the ...”

“... speech in the story ‘Praises’ that is all the more pathetic for being sincerely meant: ‘May I for a moment be personal? For this place has been my life . . . And I have never wanted another. I remember the great days. It has been my privilege to serve – and to have for friends – the highest in the land’: that is, the women who come to her ...”