“... 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 ...”

“... Isles. They must mean something. But again, what? Repeatedly Hutton confesses that we have ‘no reliable evidence’ and that ‘nothing is certain.’ Yet his survey also makes clear that a quantity of strange facts are being unearthed all the time. On South Uist, archaeologists thought they were on to something when they discovered human bodies under ...”

“... My role involved sitting on a set of steps to one side of the stage in Silchester village hall, and reading out, from a primitive autocue – a series of large sheets of white cardboard, the text handwritten on them in thick felt-tip pen – the story of the first Christmas, as my contemporaries performed what I spoke. The most thrilling scene for me ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... St Peter at the gates of Heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.24 February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.18 March. Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one ...”

“... is visiting Long Beach,’ she declared, urging the manager to hold a reception for King at City Hall. He refused: ‘He’s a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political ...”

“... been brought up by her grandparents, both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused ...”

“... enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he evidently entertained ...”