“... branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally produced.’ As are, presumably, its pesticide residues. When I ask why the flour could not be locally produced and nevertheless be organic she cannot explain. Money is, I imagine, the short answer ...”

“... and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of midnight ...”

“... all their beloved pets; cats and dogs (Keeper, Grasper, Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake, Flossy, Black Tom, Tiger) but also a rescued pheasant and hawk. Already we are acquainted with some of the peculiarities of the individuals – their politics, their passions (anecdotes make us feel like we know them quite well) – and we have probably been ...”

“... like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s ...”

“... was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function of the old ...”

“... those celebrity ‘shag-tree’ diagrams found on the internet, the ones that purport to show that Tom Cruise and Pope Benedict, say, have both slept with X or Y. But Murphy and Garland weren’t exactly pillow-queens either. Just about the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the ...”

“... feel the need of it – he had in Diffusionism a different ‘dream of redemption’, in a Tom Nairn phrase, with which to heal the ‘maimed past’. ‘Scotland’s salvation, the world’s salvation’, lay for Gibbon ‘in ultimate cosmopolitanism’. ‘Braid Scots,’ he thought, ‘may yet give lovely lights and shadows not only to English but ...”

“... the CIA in Thailand, his stories were nevertheless leaked to journalists, most prominently Judith Miller of the New York Times, which published them on the front page. I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Well, you never know what’s going to happen. I presented the President a list of about fifteen things that could go terribly, terribly wrong before the war ...”

“... Wilson says, ‘catnip’ to this demographic, citing Ian Hamilton’s writing in Granta and Karl Miller’s celebrated paean in the LRB (29 July 1990): ‘fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable, urchin-like and waif-like, a strong head and torso with comparatively frail-looking breakable legs, strange-eyed, pink-faced, fair-haired, tense and upright, a ...”