“... his widowed mother dies unexpectedly. The place is ‘a wretched house to work in, crickets in the kitchen, cockroaches in the garret, spiders and mice everywhere’. As a servant, Phemy struggles to cope with the ‘cataract of industry’ and ‘ceaseless flagellations’ of a ‘harsh rushing life’. But ‘at times the pressure was charged with a special ...”

“... books?’ That reply always ends a conversation. On the way into the hall on the last night I saw Martin Amis, on assignment for Newsweek, being scanned with a metal detector. I collected my floor pass and headed for stage right, by the West Virginia delegation, who were wearing ‘War on Coal’ pins and mining helmets to remind the nation which state lights ...”

“... vehicles that might as well be a house, but an honest to goodness two-bedroom, living-room, kitchen and bathroom house that will, when it arrives where it is going, be fixed on elevated bricks and be called home by its inhabitants. At least for a while. The buildings in America may be on the move, but it’s nothing compared to the lack of fixity of the ...”

“... downstairs. At first it simply seems to be a slightly blurred record of a domestic interior: a kitchen, a sitting-room with on the floor some toys including a couple of model planes. Suddenly one of these planes takes off, then another lands and soon the kitchen and dining-room have turned into a busy international ...”

“... for the longest hour, remained undisturbed. Then I got two pound coins in quick succession.St Martin-in-the Fields Day-Centre, at Trafalgar Square, was due to open at 6.30 the evening I went. I arrived there just after five and already there were two dozen people waiting around outside. An elderly man in a grey coat, with white hair and beard and no ...”

“... the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”

“... with both feet on the ground’, telepathic back-projection from old age in an Australian kitchen to adolescent presence at a long-past dance in a Swiss hotelschloss is supposed to mark a triumph of the human spirit and especially the Romantic imagination: the persona beamed back discovers the ‘figures of the tireless dance disguised’ and leads ...”

“... evolutionism of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which ...”

“... Uninvited by Bill Clinton to join other high-achieving Italian-Americans, such as Nicolas Cage, Martin Scorsese and ex-baseball player Joe Garagiola, at the bean-feast held in honour of President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Corso is typecast as an involuntary amnesia case, a sleeve-tugger of enormous charm. A street poet in an age that has no use for poets or ...”

“... And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ‘crisis fiction’ of the ...”

“... an erudite Renaissance Hellenist, more eirenic and less bold than his close friend Martin Luther. Melanchthon had created the German Protestant system of classical education and was still a household name, at least in learned Protestant households, in the 19th century. Sotheby produced a spectacular catalogue of this collection, with ...”

“... dread, hearing the screams of his wife, his mother, his daughter, being taken – in the barn, the kitchen, in the bushes! Think of it, my dear brothers and sisters! … And his vicious, animal attacks’ offspring, this white man named things like ‘mulatto’ and ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon’ and all those other things that he has called us – you and ...”

“... cultural, global and parochial, chemical and organic, the death of the planet and the fun of the kitchen, ‘sustainable production’ and ‘sustainable diet’. You only have to spend a moment on the literature to grasp that these are not confused people, unable to make up their minds; it’s simply that they want a range of interventions on ...”

“... a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at ...”