“... I’ve paid my dues.’ Jones just shook his head, as though amazed at the depth of our shared self-deception, and then said: ‘You people have fucked the whole thing up. When we get there we’re going to do things differently.’ I remember sitting there thinking, ‘He’s confusing class and race. To get “there” he has to become us, and us is not ...”

“... such bacilli existed. The epidemic had struck at a crucial juncture. Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Imperial Berlin had pioneered the germ theory of disease, which attributed lethal epidemics to invasive micro-organisms. But this new bacteriology did not enjoy an instantaneous or universal triumph. To many it seemed like a warmed-up version of ...”

“... reminder of primitive and innocent reading experiences. Something very similar was aimed at by Robert Louis Stevenson, and in Our Ancestors Calvino has a beautiful description of the Stevensonian romance: ‘To him, writing meant translating an invisible text containing the quintessential fascination of all adventures, all mysteries, all conflicts of will ...”

“... xxii, 1-2). We are well clear of Adam Smith by now, and still going strong, but the next hop, to Robert Lowe, marks the turn for home. For Lowe is introduced as a radical Utilitarian administrator (see Utilitarianism). Utilitarianism naturally leads us to Jeremy Bentham, and Bentham equally naturally back to Utilitarianism. This makes no difference ...”

“... not distinctly memorable, either for good qualities or bad. They are not posturing, or false, or self-indulgent, or vicious in language: but there is no particular reason why any of them should be read a second time. Why is it that his critical comments, especially the negative ones, stick so much more sharply in the memory? It is not that they are ...”

“... nation, they locate identity more in history or achievement than in biology or language. Colonel Robert Monro of Foulis, that old warrior of the Thirty Years’ War, said that the Hanseatic city of Stralsund was lucky to get a Scottish garrison and governor ‘of the onley Nation that was never conquered’. Nothing about the warlike qualities of Celts. And ...”

“... Thirty, Argo recounts an old secret mission in Iran. Is there a worry here? An act of national self-reassurance? An uneasy celebration of questionable moments? An easy celebration? Whatever the answers to these questions, they have nothing to do with Quentin Tarantino’s Django. This is a violent and lurid movie lover’s movie, alternating fluently ...”

“... can’t speak like gangsters in movies? The two American films made from the story, directed by Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, in 1946 and 1964 respectively (now re-released together on DVD by the Criterion Collection), very wisely go one better than Hemingway in this matter. They leave the movie joke out. They are up to all kinds of things, but dizzying ...”

“... American but all of whom worked in the United States between 1930 (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and 1979 (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light). One might suppose that the very term ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates writing ...”

“... in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or a variation on one), where the curtains were never opened. Neither book was so huge as to destabilise the whole experience of reading. Bottom’s Dream does that. I first saw the book on the Newly Arrived shelves ...”

“... him, according to Callow, ‘much of what he knows aesthetically about sound’. That Welles was a self-conscious tyrant was crucial to his achievement. It may also explain his ambivalence towards acolytes and admirers, what Thomson calls his ‘dread of the thing most desired’. ‘I’m a king actor,’ Welles admitted in a late interview, ‘maybe a bad ...”

“... of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self. This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those ...”

“... in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making him ill. Wordsworth was writing with troubled urgency, as though his poems were a necessary psychological bulwark: ‘As I have had no books I have been obliged ...”

“... we want to take certain lives and kinds of art – and how we take them seriously without self-referencing the life out of them, without deadening the very things that constitute their once bright, now frazzled eros and ethos. One of the big differences between Bowie’s heyday in the 1970s and now is that today you can choose from a huge selection of ...”

“... of good will’; ‘a little unpopular with the other boys, who regard him as rather boastful and self-important’; ‘I much admired his fighting spirit in the boxing’ (here too, perhaps, the dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a ...”