“... we agreed that if there was one man in the world we did not envy it was David Robinson. He may have chosen a fascinating subject, but to marshal the facts, to make sense of them and to produce a readable and entertaining book was like climbing Everest without oxygen. He was faced with a staggering amount of material. More has been written about Chaplin ...”

“... people with a world-view radically different from their own. To accept that is to accept that they may have been wrong in some of their most basic assumptions about America in our time, that they have made some of the same mistakes in interpreting their own society that they recently made in interpreting Iran. It is to recognise that the progressive modernism ...”

“... the Conservative Party. Promotion is what matters to most new Conservative MPs – though this may be fuelled less by personal ambition than by the expectations of local Conservative Associations. When I was first elected, in the early Sixties, there was a phalanx of knights of the shire who did not hanker to become junior ministers, but who knew the ...”

“... thing was twenty-five years old, just like him. And so it was: the date on the cover said April/May 1962. Small wonder that when it came to my turn to address the conference I was in richly elegiac mood. By that stage, I was doing my own casting: that is to say, I had actually turned into what they’d hired me as: a relic. I announced as my subject: Why ...”

“... There could hardly be a more striking contrast with Pushkin’s characters. Onegin and his Tatyana may not have been great readers, but they were steeped in a well-defined cultural and literary tradition stretching from Richardson to Rousseau and Byron. They tended to re-enact the romantic roles that their contemporaries had become so excited about. In The ...”

“... novelist’s ear, possibly what was known when I was a boy as a pack of lies. Not only the cynical may find it remarkable how these writers, so dull at home, become so fascinating abroad, so easily embroiled in sexual intrigues, backwoods vendettas, dangerous adventures, so readily adopted by crazed millionaires, whimsical bandits, insatiable madams of ...”

“... and Cockie Blixen, Bror’s second wife, on safari’. Who are Tommy and Cockie? The moviegoer may remember that the Baroness’s husband was called ‘Bror’. He is mentioned only twice in the book, unnamed: ‘When the war broke out, my husband and the two Swedish assistants on the farm volunteered and went down to the German border ... My husband wrote ...”

“... as Joyce’, but – well – he is much more slippery; the reader falls through crevices which may or not have been deliberately left in the structure. The structure is in any case unsound: like Stead’s (and Banville’s and Barker’s to boot), its feature is doubleness or gemination – here duplicity is another formal option. The narrators are ...”

“... book seems to have been hopelessly unfinished at the time of his death. In Capote’s case, we may be forgiven for asking if the fame didn’t far outstrip the promise, and if his was rather less a major talent dissipated than a minor gift cleverly marketed. Taking the generous view of Capote’s talent and importance after the publication of his first ...”

“... that would echo the speculation, in Les Fleurs du mal, that ‘perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond’, that fusing music and sound with colour and light would push the viewer/listener into a realm beyond thought. Baudelaire himself, like Delacroix and Madame de Staël, revered music’s ‘absence of reasoning’, an escape into pure ...”

“... desire to score points is the only conceivable reason for reading The Man without Qualities. It may be that these views belong only to Madeleine, who can’t imagine any sensible person really believing in all this stuff. But Eugenides never allows us to see it as anything but a pose. It’s in the nature of this kind of theory that its worth can be ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”

“... rings. Welsh doesn’t say who’s calling, but their dealer seems a likely answer. Welsh may yet write the great Edinburgh novel, or we may just get more prequels to ...”

“... that Sinn Féin possesses a radical core beneath a moderate façade, the real concern is that it may be the other way round. That’s something that will play out over the next few years. Right now, the crucial decisions about the future of the country are still being made a long way from Dublin. The European economic commissioner, Olli Rehn, weighed in ...”

“... illegal) bombing of Laos. Le Duan either didn’t get Nixon’s message or was unimpressed. What may have had more effect was Nixon’s announced intention to reduce progressively the number of US forces in South Vietnam by arming the South Vietnamese, a programme grandly styled ‘Vietnamisation’ but chiefly designed ‘to placate public opinion at ...”