“... Tolstoy was much preoccupied with questions of identity. His brutally penetrating intelligence, as well as the instinctive self-confidence of an aristocrat, were always running incredulously up against the fact of existence, and the certainty of non-existence. What and who was he at different moments of the day? One of his earliest attempts at writing is a history of 24 hours, a record of his various selves during that period ...”

“... Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s population, as many as died in two world wars, almost ten times as many as have died in a decade of Aids. The virus, transmitted by airborne mucus and saliva, spread via coughs and sneezes ...”

“... One way of thinking of the city – any city – according to Charles Jencks, is as ‘an uncanny organism, a slime mould’ that has always refused the marshalling of planners. ‘Inevitably,’ he writes, ‘mechanistic models did not work according to plan: their separation of functions was too coarse and their geometry too crude to aid the fine-grained growth and decline of urban tissue ...”

“... 8 June. Time for predictions. The entrails say that history seems to be the best guide to performance in World Cups. In the last six Cups, going back to 1982, 11 out of 12 slots in the final have been contested by just four teams: Brazil, Argentina, Germany and Italy. In fact, there has never been a final without one of these four teams. Why? It is interesting and odd that history should be such a powerful predictor ...”

“... In March 1815, Madame d’Arblay, the woman we know better as Fanny Burney, was forced by the arrival of Napoleon from Elba to flee Paris and to leave behind almost all her possessions. ‘Books – Cloaths Trinkets – Linnen – argenterie Goods – MSS!!! All!’ When she reached Brussels, she wrote to her brother Charles: ‘Unless some speedy happy turn takes place, in public affairs here, we have lost all we possessed in France ...”

“... At André Malraux’s funeral, in November 1976, two red wreaths were delivered to the cemetery: one came from the French Communist Party, an organisation to which he never belonged, the other from Lasserre, a three-rosette restaurant near the Grand Palais where he had liked to lunch – on his own should company fail. Lasserre had done the honours for a first time to this most bankable of habitués when he was still alive, by adding pigeon André Malraux to its list of entrées, a gesture which inscribed him obliquely in the literary lineage he most aspired to, of writers who had also been men of action: had the name of Chateaubriand, explorer, soldier, politician and Romantic elder, not earlier been incorporated à la carte as a way of doing steak? The posthumous tribute from the PCF on the other hand can hardly have been automatic ...”

“... The writer Neal Stephenson, in response to a question about his own fame or lack of it, came up with a usefully precise and clarifying answer: It helps to put this in perspective by likening me to the mayor of Des Moines, Iowa. It’s true of both the mayor of Des Moines and of me that, out of the world’s population of some six billion people, there are a few hundred thousand who consider us important, and who recognise us by name ...”

“... Saying ‘I told you so’ is supposed to be near unbeatable fun, so it’s disappointing to report that, in the case of the government’s handling of the British economy, speaking for myself, no fun is being had. As George Osborne’s autumn statement made clear, the scale and speed and completeness with which things are going wrong are numbing. The Tories went into the 2010 election with a manifesto commitment to reduce the structural deficit – the amount by which the government’s spending in any given year exceeds its income, excluding temporary effects from the downturn ...”

“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”

“... From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist ...”

“... OK,​ there are some things Bruce Springsteen and I don’t share. I haven’t sold 120 million albums; my net worth isn’t calculated by Forbes and, in any case, hasn’t yet reached $345 million; I haven’t rocked the planet for forty years; and Ex-President Obama has not hung the Medal of Freedom around my neck and said in my presence: ‘I’m the president, but he’s “the Boss” ...”

“... In​ June 1954, the tall, wary 21-year-old classical pianist Eunice Waymon found herself outside the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey a few blocks north of the Boardwalk. Waymon, who had spent most of her hard-striving life in North Carolina, the sixth of eight offspring born to grandchildren of slaves, had never before been in a bar ...”

“... Our early forebears​ continue to be very good at getting in the news. In 2003, on the island of Flores in Indonesia, a team of archaeologists investigating the movement of humans from Asia to Australia found a nearly intact small skeleton of what turned out to be an entirely new kind of human being: Homo floresiensis. The fact that its body was diminutive caused it to be immediately given the idiotic nickname ‘hobbit’ – because nothing resembles Tolkien’s stolidly Anglo agrarians so much as a 50,000-year-old dwarf hominid skeleton from South-East Asia ...”

“... Iremember​, back at the start of lockdown, trying to draw up a rough mental ledger of things I would miss. The idea was to try and anticipate difficulties so as not to be blindsided by them. My list was heartfelt but unoriginal and consisted mainly, now I look back at it, of various blessings of city life that I had come to take almost entirely for granted ...”

“... Art’s story) When I was young, I coveted the money and the woman, kept coaxing busy blood drops from my reluctant thumb, grumbled out the spell-cracked poems of a sorcerer’s apprentice. No rich. No fetch the ladies, either. Then I saw an ad: ‘Join La Table Ronde,’ it said, ‘accrue the benefits of debt.’ I wrote for details. A pile of bumf arrived, a plastic card ...”