“... and shrugged off the matter with the remark that henceforth Monsieur le Comte de Lastic might rob all the good women of Paris of their butter without any protest from him. An even more striking coincidence concerns the writing of the novel Julie (better-known, later, as La Nouvelle Héloïse). Rousseau was at this time living in the Hermitage, Madame ...”

“... have Indian friends, politely abstains from doing anything for Willie when he gets to London. As a young man Willie’s father had neglected his education and perversely taken up with a low-caste, extraordinarily dull girl, flouting his father’s choice of bride. He broke his vow of sexual abstinence, taken on the model of Gandhi, and so Willie was born, and ...”

“... enlarges our public. I know that this enlarged public is precisely what vexes retired literati and young aesthetes. But why should we tremble before a clientèle composed of the entire nation?’ It wasn’t long before he was to speak quite differently: ‘we have seen the gutter press in heat, making a profit out of sick minds, driving the public mad for the ...”

“... forces. The state machinery was dismantled. Direct imperial rule seemed feasible to Washington. Young Republicans were sent off to rule Iraq like the offspring of British gentry dispatched to loot India in the 18th century. A 24-year-old Republican who applied for a job at the White House was instead sent to Iraq to reopen the Baghdad stock exchange. It ...”

“... years he has watched it all: enclosure, civil war, the church being built, civic organisation, young people getting killed far away, parish do-gooding, village expansion, razed hedges, rising house prices. To him Article 50 would be just a blip. He is ancient and forever young. All this is so unlike what you’d expect ...”

“... spare five dollars?’) is the familiar disarming overture to vicious subway muggings. A couple of young blacks do indeed approach the stopped Sherman with a deceptively friendly ‘Yo! Need some help?’ and an omnious walk which Wolfe terms ‘the pimp roll’. Sherman feels as generations of blacks must have done when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch ...”

“... said that he once stole an armoured car just to take it for a joyride. He was wild when he was young. By the time I knew him he was a genial elderly truck driver who liked to retell his mother’s stories of growing up in a village in Albania, a country he’d never visited. He was a black sheep, but in the eyes of our not very saintly family he’d long ...”

“... date by accident but soon realises the timing works to his advantage: surely no Black crew would rob the Theresa on Juneteenth. Carney has to ask an earnest young Southerner about the significance of the date, despite his college education. In a sense, Ray is culturally disinherited: his parents, whose own parents left the ...”

“... Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we rob banks,’ without quite needing the money – and the mood is vital to the 1970s: the people to love faithfully are those you never quite have.Cue Tuesday Weld. Specktor quotes someone saying that if she had settled for being ‘Susan’ Weld (her given ...”

“... who possessed it. Simone de Beauvoir is said to be ‘naturally’ authentic, which might seem to rob her of the credit she could have earned had she been forced to make herself so. Another of his women, less favoured, is denied the sufficient grace of authenticity, natural or acquired: ‘I see, for example, how L.’s desire for authenticity is poisoned by ...”

“... of political confusion caused by the Glorious Revolution; he backed the winning side, married a young widow with property of her own and settled down as a landsman. This was in 1691. By 1695 Kidd had grown tired of life on shore and he sailed for London, where he hoped to be granted the letters of marque that would allow him to take to privateering ...”

“... another, related feature of his recoil from the world into art. Flaubert often said that even when young he felt old, and one manifestation of this premature withering of the soul was a hyper-developed self-consciousness presiding over all experience. Enclosed within this circle, ‘life’ is both preceded by fiction and destined to become it. This sense of ...”

“... one of her teachers (‘I suppose I threw myself at him but I hoped not in any obvious way’), a young man of 23, called Steven Weed – not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself. He won a teaching fellowship at Berkeley, and she went with him, enrolling as an undergraduate, eventually to do art history – ‘I had been surrounded by art all ...”

“... king. A spectacular example is Ray Dalio, whose story is excellently told in The Fund by Rob Copeland, a reporter at the New York Times who was formerly the hedge fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal.Dalio is the founder and principal owner of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund. He grew up in a working-class family in Manhasset on ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”