“... fluffed up the hair along his shinbones.’ There is more at stake in this honeymoon period than may at first appear. Riley has a poetic way with a line (a Manchester sky is ‘dimmed white, like clean bone, or old wax, or Tupperware’, a description which puts you in mind of Plath’s ‘Daddy’), but there is something dangerously earnest about opening a ...”

“... quite the right age,’ says the narrator of his first novel, Metroland (1980). ‘I mean, you may happen to think I’m rather immature’ – he’s in his early twenties – ‘but actually I often don’t feel quite at ease with the age I’ve got. Sometimes, in a funny sort of way, I long to be a sprightly 65.’ Barnes’s fiction seems to value old ...”

“... by celebrating the achievement of its inventor and the process of its invention. The battery may start with Volta but cannot end with him. Meaning stays in the hands of future users. Our own culture has recently found new fascination in stories of solitary men discovering how to make timepieces and maps, dyestuffs and bombs. Pancaldi’s work stands ...”

“... twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased. Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist. ‘Not fiction but news’: Hamid is unobtrusively, but constantly, addressing the ...”

“... without overmuch comment, the view of Jackson’s friends that this was 50 per cent teasing. That may be more or less true without constituting a valid excuse. In his milieu, such things could be said only in a teasing way. What strikes one, on the contrary, is that Jackson had a pretty complete Fascist mindset, with the possible exception of ...”

“... towards the end of his book on Casaubon: The first period in the history of classical learning may be styled the Italian. The second period coincides with the French school. If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the humanist movement, the answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is ...”

“... a civic duty. There is evidence that Miller’s ultra-moral stance in opposition to this obscenity may have destroyed his own career. I don’t mean that he didn’t get work, but that his righteousness was dangerous to him artistically as well as politically, ironing out his ambivalences. What can a public man go on to do once he has confirmed his goodness ...”

“... tyranny, that they need it to sustain and explain their lives. Worse, she fears that they may have created the tyranny they now submit to: ‘He’d simply walked by naked. They were the ones who had dressed him. Because they themselves needed power but were afraid of exercising it. They preferred to give it to a poor passerby who was dumbfounded when ...”

“... of heretics (which he was), a man perhaps unhealthily obsessed by his daughter Meg (which he may have been), and someone who makes cruelly unfunny jokes about his second wife, Dame Alice (which he did). He is not much else (although he was). Here Mantel’s revisionary eye seems cruel, or to have missed something. Her Wolsey has an instinctive ability to ...”

“... enterprise in which Hitler and his coterie of chieftains invested much effort and imagination. It may have been one of the cleverest things they ...”

“... himself on the Italian front in 1918; and Rudi, the third son, poisoned himself in Berlin on what may have been the second anniversary of Hans’s death. ‘Karl was blamed for loading his sons with excessive career pressure,’ Waugh writes, ‘for insisting that none of them should pursue any profession that didn’t involve the two disciplines that had ...”

“... and educational qualifications – in other words, class.’ This assertion, unremarkable as it may seem, represents a substantial advance over multiculturalist anti-racism, since the logic of anti-racism requires only the correction of disparities within classes rather than between them. If about 1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani ...”

“... austere, elegant, ‘moreish’ – that are not stably referential at all but which may do descriptive work if people know the liquids to which such words are routinely applied and can, by extension, form an idea of how an as yet untasted wine might be similar. But this wasn’t a game Saintsbury was much interested in playing. Connoisseur that ...”

“... mine, he is ours, and therefore I must be, in that sense, a god in this; where he is concerned I may decide what is best. And I believe this has done me good. I remember him. Again.’ The encounters between Willie and his father are some of the most affecting scenes in the novel. But they also set the stage for the book’s central conundrum. Contemplating ...”

“... his ears’. Elsewhere Grigson describes one of the first chimpanzees in England, which arrived in May 1698 and was exhibited at Moncrief’s coffeehouse in Threadneedle Street, where it soon died. It was reported that the ‘monster’ came from ‘Angola in Africk, and was sold to the Captain amongst a parcel of slaves’. Slaves surface with some frequency ...”