“... the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the mere desire to extend your range, to become a god in your medium, speaks more reliably to vanity than talent. For Burgess, the project of writing a long novel bringing together far-flung crises and corners of 20th-century history more or less ...”

“... he heard in his head. His last major works, the Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale ...”

“... Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in Ireland.) The Commission was a ruse devised to destroy Parnell’s reputation, and one into ...”

“... Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw ...”

“... he might have been going to Hull – or even back to Leeds. So now in the evenings, after we’d finished our Russian lessons, I started to read for a scholarship again, biking in along Trumpington Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have ...”

“... coffee bar by the stairs. There was the Manifesto Club (‘For Freedom in Everyday Life’): ‘We organise picnics in public places,’ the very nice girl told me, ‘and we smoke and drink at them.’ There was WorldWrite (‘Ferraris for All’): ‘We’re against the notion of ...”

“... Fidel Castro (hereinafter called the Tyrant) that Heberto Padilla (the Poet) has had in the past. We left the Tyrant saying goodbye to the Poet, in his fashion, from the door of one of his many dens in Havana. The Tyrant has no fixed abode: the whole of Cuba is his maze and he is central to it, but his hell is a spiral with no centre. When the Poet, with a ...”

“... cringed when my parents told me about it, proudly, some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’A good deal of indoctrination must have gone into that. Did it come from reiteration by family that I was one of the ...”