“... of these transitory trades, not forgetting Mesdames Renée and Fifi. But back to the war. What, it may be wondered, was the part played in the struggle by Captain Molyneux and Captain Amies? Irish-born Molyneux had won the Military Cross and been wounded three times in 1914-18. With the one good eye left to him he had built up a fashion house which enjoyed ...”

“... who wish to do murder, they better not do it in the state of Florida, because we may have a problem with our electric ...”

“... leaders, has effectively made travel arrangements for anyone who holds different views. This may be perfectly obvious, but long experience has taught me that not all innocents have the same status. In 1948 my mother, brother and I were deported from Austria by a pro-Tito English colonel who lectured us that we had no right to leave a country run by ...”

“... bereavements, casual institutional brutality, adolescent male sexuality, possible alcoholism – may seem to make for depressing reading, the book leaves one with a sense of exhilaration. Healy is very aware of the tricks which memory and a retrospective desire for order can play, and is at pains to let us know that, while he cannot avoid their snares, he ...”

“... majestic. The mountains and highland plains have played a big part in Ethiopia’s isolation, and may have something to do with its distinct calendar (eight years behind our own), and the unique script and alphabet of the Amharic language. Ethiopia is the only country in Africa never to have been colonised, apart from the brief but damaging Italian occupation ...”

“... were due to his ‘disturbed relationship’ to his own mother, and then to add that ‘it may seem no accident that the most powerful and organised movement to correct this balance came from an analyst who was also a Jewish woman’ – Melanie Klein – is to adopt what might be called the Whig view of psychoanalysis: that it has become progressively ...”

“... south of England, particularly London, and from Yorkshire and points north. The London emigrant may well have started his wanderings elsewhere: he is a classic case of the fact that people become migrants in mind before they decide on their actual destination. These economic refugees, mostly men, went out in small numbers on ships doing miscellaneous ...”

“... by Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Like Rybakov, Voinovich has been overtaken by events: whatever may be the end-result of the Gorbachovshchina, for the moment the progress towards a grey, featureless socialist future seems to have been halted, and what might have been a reasonable bet in the days of Brezhnev or Andropov now appears to be very much of a long ...”

“... God allotted to Caine’ – followed by his further assessment of its inhabitants: ‘These men may very well and truely be called Wilde, because there is no poorer people in the world.’ The image of destitute savages living in a frigid wilderness is the first stereotype that Brody tries to correct. He counters quotations of explorers through the ...”

“... heavily-populated Berkshire. Once again, there were arguments about the figures. But when, in May 1988, a government committee produced the results of a long and thorough inquiry into child cancers in and around the Dounreay plant in Scotland, the question which I hadn’t asked in 1964 was answered. There is a high rate of child cancer in the area, so ...”

“... hurt side. ‘He built Fuseli, his gangster, on this ambivalence and wrote it for me.’ What may be just as significant is a part he played at Yale Drama School, not mentioned in the book: Solyony in The Three Sisters. Some student director, or perhaps a shrewd tutor, saw a lot of Solyony in the 21-year-old Anatolian Greek immigrant: a withdrawn, sullen ...”

“... generate an uncertainty which is added to by a narrator who is not identified by name, and who may well be Chatwin himself. Although he isn’t quite the full-blooded Unreliable Narrator beloved of Post-Modernism, he comes close: ‘Did he have a moustache? I forget. Add a moustache, subtract a moustache ...’ He meets Utz in Prague in 1967, in the course ...”

“... campaign as a war correspondent. But even that is not necessarily true. The rites of a religion may in time be ignored and forgotten by those who once thought them a ...”

“... up regularly, and give an estimate of the size of the pool. I calculate that around 100,000 people may have read the first edition: a substantial intellectual constituency, albeit diachronically gerrymandered.) But Ekman is the man who took Darwin’s anecdotes and validated them with tidy experimental protocols, cultural neutrality and adequate ...”

“... word to a phrase which unites mankind’, the moment ‘to which all theatre leads’. In this he may be wrong, but he knows what he’s saying, and he has thought through the consequences. Throughout his career, Brook has sought to define the nature of that moment, of itself and in relation to the moments which surround it. In the essays that make up The ...”