“... and Engels wrote, ‘in Saint-Just’s illusion. On the day of his execution he saw hanging in the Hall of the Conciergerie the great tables of the Rights of Man, and with pride and self-esteem declared: “After all, it was I who did that.” But those tables proclaimed the rights of a man who could no more be the man of ...”

“... It is no surprise when you arrive in Harare, formerly Salisbury, and a taxi driver recommends the Courtney Hotel. After all, there is still a hotel named after Speke in Kampala, Uganda, and the New Stanley Hotel has remained a well-known establishment in Nairobi. But to discover that the Courtney is in Selous Avenue is more of a jolt It’s over a decade since Mugabe and his guerrillas in effect won the war to liberate Zimbabwe, but its capital’s street names are a bizarre mélange ...”

“... left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as ...”

“... State, is counting? After the first half-dozen aliases, the point is made. Mr Nobody. Howard is no Lon Chaney. The only detectable difference in the albums of passport photographs, now being recycled to promote the Super Furry Animals, is the degree of pupil dilation. Every flash in the photo-booth freezes a ‘Say No to ...”

“... had introduced the topic of ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ to the national discourse, something no one was talking about before he entered politics because of political correctness, which is strangling America. The other big problem was the incompetence of the political hacks employed by the government, who make terrible deals. A case in point was Obama’s ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by ...”

“... heat and humidity of the summer, so the sense of empty space is subtly intensified. There is no Manhattanish bustle between office and subway (there is no subway); just the coming and going of the cars. In my early days there it was perhaps some unacknowledged form of homesickness that kept me perversely reading the ...”

“... coloured light. Light, as we say, is physically a different type of wave from sound, and allows of no harmonics. Nevertheless, Scriabin wrote a part for the light-keyboard to be played in an orchestral suite first performed in New York in 1915. When the Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951 it was complete with a light ...”

“... it? Where do you draw the line, when it comes to miracles? Yes to Jesus and his own Resurrection, no to televangelists and ‘water into wine’? Or do you consider yourself a modern Christian, who is able to put all of that on one side? Myths are metaphorical, miracles are publicity, designed to launch a new religion, whose main point lay elsewhere. ‘Jesus ...”

“... and the instability of reading. Dover sole is ordered and eaten for lunch (the distance of Pointz Hall from the sea vacillates); Giles thinks of himself as a fish in the stream, and, unnoticing, eats the ‘sole’; the old carp, as old almost as pre-history, occasionally rises to the surface of the pond. Ruotolo remarks that great writers disrupt ‘the ...”

“... There is a tale to be told. The taleteller, having caught your attention, will not let go. No tricks, no mannerisms, no eye-catching Modernist flourishes: that’s the trick of it. The story is what it’s about. And how strange a sensation this is for the innocent reader who wants ...”

“... beautiful (White has a Nabokovian capacity for the splash of metaphor). Unlike his fiction, it has no talent for intimacy. His style is not very natural. The sentences refuse to lie down, and often he turns the page into a lecture hall. Even the best essay in the book, his fine celebration of Nabokov, has a kind of aural ...”

“... Recovery, a rope cinched tightly around her right ankle. She is defenceless and exposed. Captain John Kimber seems to be taking pleasure in her pain. He is corpulent, grotesque. We do not know the girl’s name. Nor did the crew who watched or assisted in her torture. They called one of her fellow captives Venus, which of course had ...”

“... In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one ...”