“... of the new South Africa are those that will decide the destiny of the planet. For Gordimer, unlike J.M. Coetzee, South Africa is still the centre of the world. In Get a Life, Aids and globalisation seize their mainly black victims. Gordimer has always been read predominantly by whites, her grandeur – the Nobel Prize she won in 1991 – viewed by black ...”

“... of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12’ – these were combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not ...”

“... to fire him, then changed his mind. A few months after that, he fired him anyway. He fired Robin Green when the series was nearly finished. ‘When David fired me, he smiled,’ Green said. ‘I loved him so much. I loved him for so long, it was just so hard to deal with the fact that he really hated me.’Part of the ...”

“... was parked described it. What I remember is seeing flashing lights of all colours: red, blue, green and a horrendous noise that actually went right down into your body. But there was like a vacuum after that, there was silence and then all of a sudden there was this swishing sound and everything just went berserk … and then we saw it in its full ...”

“... the plausible mismatches of nature’s palette? ‘Brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake.’ White matters less than Joyce, about whom Nabokov, on occasion, could be unruefully generous. In one interview, he gave out this undeniable admission: ‘my English is patball to Joyce’s champion ...”

“... there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she recites off by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a ...”

“... has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous ...”

“... One must know which battles to fight.’The story of what the true believers found, on the fresh green breast of whichever new world they came to, was to have been told in a third book, ‘Parable of the Trickster’, which survives as ‘dozens upon dozens of false starts’ in a pile of archive boxes at the Huntington Library in San ...”

“... and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised or intended when they put Britain’s state-owned electricity industry ...”

“... a long time before we meet again, we both shall find patience and comfort in that – you with J to comfort you, to ease the burden of the present, and I in the knowledge that no matter how bleak the moment may be, how futile or helpless it may seem, nothing can prevent our love, nothing can ever come between us.Where another writer might have chosen a ...”

“... prophecy supplied ‘proof of Shakespeare’s confidence in England’s destiny’, while for J.A.R. Marriott, writing in 1918, it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than a home and a country: it was an inspiration. At no period in our history has the realisation of national unity been keener, the ...”

“... Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English ...”

“... and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good-for-nothing with 11 ...”

“... Goldwater (‘regarded more than any other living American with almost universal affection’) and Ronald Reagan (‘about to engage in a great enterprise – indeed this occasion is at once his last, and unlikeliest, chance to back out’). Peering out elf-like from the convivial flux was Oakeshott. Perhaps we should imagine the young Mount too, somewhere ...”

“... anti-Soviet obsession would imperil détente and told the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr that Brzezinski was a ‘fool’ and a ‘menace’ with ‘absolutely no understanding of the Russians’. The establishment had their own representative in Cyrus Vance, a Second World War veteran, Wall Street lawyer and professional diplomat, whom Carter ...”