“... Schwartz wrote to Laughlin, ‘they appear to regard sex as a form of violent exercise a little less serious than tennis.’ Berryman remembered being at their house one evening when Gertrude showed her husband a piece she was writing for Partisan Review: ‘He pointed out the number of words beginning with “ex-” and remarked, “Freud could make ...”

“... self-education, with Coates constantly summoning himself to fresh modes of thinking. Very little in his book will be unfamiliar to readers of histories of American slavery and the mounting scholarship on the new Jim Crow. Coates, who claimed in 2013 to be ‘not a radical’, now says he has been ‘radicalised’, and as a black writer in an ...”

“... he said as he took me on a tour of his old clients. ‘Sometimes they brought you water in little tiny bottles and little old ladies could carry that. But sometimes they brought five-litre bottles that little old ladies had no chance of carrying.’ He introduced me to Gladys ...”

“... they fix an image once and for all. Far from being illustrations, they have a quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from ...”

“... from the CIA and revived his skills as an infantryman. He was surprised to discover that, with a little experience, you can usually tell from the sound when a bullet is coming directly at you. From walking around up to his neck in flooded marshes he caught hepatitis. In mid-summer 1967, after he had recovered somewhat, he left Vietnam and returned to ...”

“... herself she exacerbated the frictions of Cold War. Like George Kennan, with whom she otherwise has little in common, she slipped ideas into the policy-making bloodstream, where they took on a life of their own. Her notions about the way Russian child development shaped Soviet politics only emboldened American anti-communists to dismiss cultural analysis ...”

“... their fanciful pedigrees (they boasted of founders ranging from the first Pope Gregory to King Arthur), they adopted fancy ways of living, which involved long stays in Edinburgh and London and mounting expenditure on food, wine and clothes. In Devine’s words, the chiefs were attempting ‘to live in the style of 18th-century gentlemen on the meagre ...”

“... usually also the interesting stuff, gets muffled. In the course of a conversation about Freud with Arthur Koestler, Orwell said: ‘When I lie in my bath in the morning, which is the best moment of the day, I think of tortures for my enemies.’ I sometimes do that too: being helpless in the bath is the best moment to indulge horrible fantasies of retributory ...”

“... arrived, as did another musician for Wilde. Gide held in his ‘bare arms that perfect, wild little body, so dark, so ardent, so lascivious … After Mohammed had left me, I remained for a long time in a state of quivering jubilation … Since then, whenever I have sought pleasure, it is the memory of that night I have pursued.’ Gide subsequently met ...”

“... Then he went on: ‘I met him in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work.’ He told another interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, ‘who asked me some years ago to make some confidential inquiries on business and related matters … I don’t think it ...”

“... pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, declaring ‘we have ...”

“... naivety and provincialism. They did not recognise the authority of Christian tradition and had little interest in Jewish tradition, though the incomparably dramatic but morally unaccountable Hebrew Bible probably shaped their temperament more than they liked to admit. They wanted to stop sounding like their relatives; they wanted an end to softness and ...”

“... Young Fritz, too, came to feel for the first time that he was not ‘Aryan’, a word that had had little resonance before. He knew nothing of his Jewish origins until his father’s severe lecture after he directed an anti-semitic remark at his sister. Then the seven-year-old began to learn who he was, or at least who he was considered to be by the new ...”

“... Independence​ was handed to Ceylon’s elite on a platter. ‘Think of Ceylon as a little bit of England,’ Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column ...”

“... pro and con. We had to do a fair amount of that.You weren’t encouraged, as we were, to go in for little whimsical Charles Lamb-like essays? Writing trivia about trivia?No. The senior English master was a raging Leavisite, an absolute caricature.Had he been to Cambridge?No, he’d been to Southampton and had been thoroughly instructed there by a ...”