“... there are one or two (you always get one or two) who will no longer speak to me. After the show I may go to the Safety Curtain, or on to a party, but usually I just walk home. I say that people know my face, but the mere act of walking generally protects me from recognition. In Charing Cross Road for example, I become invisible. This enables me to unwind in ...”

“... learning which Mosley outlined in one of his essays. The third level, he claimed, ‘is that which may be necessary for survival ... It is the chance for a man to see not just the patterns of his behaviour but also the patterns of his ability to see – and by this, not just to be free of patterns, but possibly to influence them.’ Hopeful Monsters finds the ...”

“... be reluctant to agree with the Reverend Sterne that ‘writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation’ – but much of the reason we relish the new novelists in English is that their experiences are not often our experiences, their way with our language not our way with their language. I’d ...”

“... Oxford’s spell, or under the spell of an Oxford he never quite managed to locate. The young Ved may have been a trifle gauche and smarmy but the old Mehta is quite proud of him. We hear of the boy’s lively debating skills, his conscientiousness, his charm, and we are left in no doubt that, after a somewhat shaky start, he was eventually moving in the ...”

“... rent she had previously refused. Afterwards she asked: ‘Are you angry?’ ‘I’m not now but I may be later,’ I replied. Janet caused the same waves and frictions after her death that she had caused in life. She did not leave any will or last wishes. There were arguments about her memorial services both in England and in New York. Some of her Jewish ...”

“... and joined the rest of your kind, and in doing so have come closer to knowing me, beneath you as I may seem to be in my doggy ways.’ Tintin, for his part, apologises to his companion ‘for having been so unkind and arch with you in the past when you have swayed from duty or from even your normal stroll beside me to bound away after some lady dog’. After ...”

“... sums it up nicely: the villagers, he says, were ‘vainly attempting to restore a lost world which may never have existed’. The economic aspects of that struggle we are better able to understand, in all their complexity, after reading this book. What we are still no better able to understand is the sort of thing that happened at Datchet, near Windsor, in ...”

“... chapter on comparative cleanliness which ends with the judgment that ‘France and England may be ranked amongst the tolerably clean nations, England taking the lead: but real cleanliness is not general in either ... The majority prefer a modest degree of dirtiness as being more conducive to their true comfort.’ There is a mass of later secondary ...”

“... was (and is) much less clear. Oddly for an historian, he never stops to consider that Mafia may have changed. Pino Arlacchi told me recently that he used to take the line that Duggan does in the book – that Mafia as an organisation does not exist – but does so no longer. He accepts that Duggan is right for the period up to the 1950s, but after that ...”

“... and grandchildren, and says she had a son who was a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid she may not be believed. And indeed there are some who do not believe her.’ It is a Chekhov ending, like that of another late story, ‘Three Years’, in which after a terrible time at home the rebellious young girl Nadya ‘in a lively cheerful mood left the ...”

“... unexpectedly antagonistic couple, is comic, but also dangerous: any of the four characters may, at any time, lose all self-possession. As Avram says: ‘It’s incredible. No one has thrown anything.’ In these early stories, the reader, safely out of range of hurled objects, contemplates characters who consider themselves masters of their ...”

“... because I am as useless at fairy time as I would be at computing a dictionary; and anyway, he may have had in mind all those volunteer readers and their helpful slips, for large fairies, if, unlike bugganes, benevolent, sometimes do the housework.The Random House Dictionary †, which turns up at the same time as the second edition of the OED, is in a ...”

“... crag in Crete with oregano and goat smells in the air. And home? Where is it now? The olive grove may well be levelled under folds of tar. The wooden house made joyful with a stove has gone the way of Tsar and samovar. The small house with 8 people to a room with no privacy for quiet thought or sex bulldozed in the island’s tourist boom to make way for Big ...”

“... orchestra), impart their message without using scenery, require none of the trappings of theatre, may be either of a secular or sacred nature, and possess a certain level of intellectual and musical development.’ Leaving on one side vagueness – and the last phrase is very vague, like many other phrases in the book – there are other difficulties in this ...”

“... prime by the stocking tops, to borrow one of Denis’s phrases, which Mrs Thatcher often used. May God forgive them. For the road to 22 November 1990, when Mrs Thatcher resigned, was mostly paved with gold. Never have we seen such an advance in the condition of the ordinary decent hard-working socially responsible and ambitious people of Britain. My kind ...”