“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in California, told the Times. ‘We need someone who can teach clearly and be strong.’ When it came to the cardinals’ vote, Erdo’s case could not have ...”

“... at UCLA with several of the anthropologists on whose work he draws, including Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst; the university was also home to such scholars as Marija Gimbutas and Carlo Ginzburg, who had found shamanic traces in the archaeology and folklore of prehistoric and medieval Europe.This new turn displaced armchair ethnography with ...”

“... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...”

“... perfectly normal people – people from all over, people from the North, people from the South, white people, black people, people with proper jobs and people who had just left school, but not, on the whole, rich or middle-class people. Not professionals. We were just enthusiastic amateurs, people from small towns who thought we could change the world but ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”

“... Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence up your arse.’ Expensive cars disgorged burly men from Ayrshire and Fife. A Rangers banner was attached to the metal railings in front of the cenotaph. Sections of the crowd chanted ‘Rule Britannia’ and ...”

“... not, but she thinks it anyway. I drive to her flat, navigating by map and mobile. She is wearing a white tracksuit. She has painted the walls of her flat an apricot colour. She leaves the door open. We can see the trees swaying in the wind. When I come in, Blair is speaking on Al Jazeera. I stand next to the screen, relieved that she will now see I don’t ...”

“... to the other, from cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped ...”

“... a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak … Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world. As the American journalist Carl Hoffman writes in his dual biography of Manser and the American collector of Dayak art Michael Palmieri, ‘Bruno, in essence, wanted to stop time.’ He ...”

“... Street, two hundred girls turned out in their night attire into the winter cold. Her face was white, her eyes were staring; she whispered: ‘I put him in the wardrobe.’The expense of travelling, the logistical manoeuvres required, the wear and tear on the nerves, meant that the visits had to be well spaced out. And gradually, I realised that my world ...”

“... black scholar’s robe, looks gloomily out at the viewer, the long hair of his face draped over a white ruff, while behind him looms the entrance to a cave, a reference to the traditional dwellings of the Guanches. Maddalena – about seven or eight – wears a gold brocade gown worthy of a princess, encrusted with pearls and precious stones, a large jewelled ...”

“... to catch some telltale sign of intelligence chiming in at the special frequency. He heard mostly white noise; one heart-thumping squawk, he later realised, came not from the sky but from a top-secret military installation nearby. Not easily discouraged, he attracted colleagues to the topic, and SETI was underway. Cocconi and Morrison’s Nature article makes ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... Terror gave way to bored misery; moral absolutism to irony. Things stopped looking so black and white. In The Zone, Dovlatov maintains a deadpan tone, without a trace of melodrama. The writer-narrator tells his editor: I am interested in life and not in prison, and in people, not monsters. And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil ...”