“... of general scientific knowledge, the cinema’s achievements reach no higher than such biopics as Young Tom Edison (1940 – one of Mickey Rooney’s less memorable efforts), Madame Curie (1943, a weepy Greer Garson vehicle) and sub-standard science fiction. What Desmond has apparently taken from Hollywood with his ‘ciné’ style of narration is a fondness ...”

“... diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion. It was an age of military dandyism like no other. Was there, then, a case for cracking down on the monstrous millinery of war? Was towering headgear really necessary to overawe the enemy? How many British ...”

“... before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful figures are pole-axed all around him because he plays the buffoon so successfully that no one can see in him a future emperor. Born in 1913, Deedes grew up in a castle that was sold off for ...”

“... In October 1920​ , Gaito Gazdanov, then a young soldier, returned to his armoured train in the Crimea to find that it had been captured by the Red Army. He escaped in November by crossing the Black Sea to Constantinople with some of his fellow soldiers. He was one of more than 150,000 refugees – the sad remains of General Wrangel’s defeated White Army, along with any civilians who managed to make it on board – on a fleet of 126 ships ...”

“... and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 1935. His childhood seems to have been appalling and he was reluctant to discuss it. He never knew his ...”

“... declaring a fervent desire to do the same thing to the Senate. The historian Cassius Dio, then a young man, was there and recalls that he and his senatorial peers were torn between laughter and terror, knowing the emperor happily murdered those who displeased him. Eventually, after 11 years of burgeoning madness, Commodus was himself murdered. The prefect of ...”

“... of fable, discreetly foreshadowed in the first pages of the book. Frédéric and a friend, when young, visited a brothel in their native town, but they were not able to enjoy its pleasures because Frédéric got scared and ran off. His friend had to leave, too, because Frédéric had the money. The last words of the novel describe a late conversation ...”

“... strangers would be antiquarian: it was a relic from a time, not so long ago, when for the aspiring young the printed word, and that special kind of it called literature, was a medium not seriously challenged by any other. That time was surely gone, I thought, and printed literature now had a hard time claiming even parity with competing media like film, rock ...”

“... English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that ...”

“... The cuckoo lays her eggs in other birds’ nests, he tells us, and ‘another bird will raise her young.’ By exploiting a little-known hole in a text-editing program common to many large systems called Gnu-Emacs, the hacker is able to lay an egg-program in the computer’s operating system that hatches to grant him the privileges of a system ...”

“... being aware of the great love between Frances and Ralph, and feeling a certain fascination, young as I was, because this didn’t seem exactly like what I’d heard in the current pop songs. It was a force which is unsentimentally documented here: I sit writing with my back to the log fire which crackles softly and flicks tongues of light into the ...”

“... conch in Lord of the Flies; they sounded a challenge on the battlefield. And this is where young Roland’s ‘slug-horn’ finds its place. As the hero’s ‘slogan’ it is, as it were, the ‘mott’ – both ‘fanfare’ and ‘saying’ – through which he declares himself, in which his poem ends, and from which (‘See Edgar’s song in ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... I find it too distressing to write down what the case means to me, when so many people believe the young man is simply a lost cause, a person in the grip of evil. The papers have been ringing asking for comment: the messages go to voicemail. Outside, buses pass in quick succession, the passengers reading their newspapers and seeming very sure of ...”