“... them hysterical letters in the 1840s, trying to radicalise them about the Irish famine. This time, Michael Collins visits Kilneagh, as a friend. The Troubles come. The house is burnt and Willie Quinton’s father is killed with his dogs and servants, not by Irishmen resenting his English connections, but by Black and Tans avenging the hanging of an informer ...”

“... Hegel had diagnosed in Kant. But nobody listened to them either, and after the discovery of the young, humanist, pragmatist Marx they, too, gave up. Just when it seemed that the dialectic which Kant began had culminated in universal acceptance of the relaxed pragmatism of Wittgenstein and Quine, Kripke exploded his bomb. In a hundred pages of sinewy ...”

“... As a young man working for Lord Beaver-brook’s broadsheet Daily Express, I used to have a highly pleasurable daydream in which the coincidence of my name being the same as my employer’s led to some confusion among the company lawyers, with the result that I became the proprietor on the Old Man’s death. I would visualise myself getting off the bus outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin ...”

“... 20 grand a year seems to be the favoured target. Beryl Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections ...”

“... undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to ...”

“... that is the name that describes him in the narrative until his true identity is discovered. The young man who comes to Arthur’s court one day in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur is given the mocking nickname of Bewmaynes Beaumains, ‘fair hands’, the hands of a man not brought up to manual labour and Bewmaynes he remains until he reveals himself privately ...”

“... and opened up the country. I hear of a Liberian aid worker who was driving up north and met some young former combatants. They charged the vehicle with machetes, but the driver didn’t flinch. ‘I’m not scared,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the power now, not you.’ That’s optimistic. Most of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and ...”

“... Clancy fired the agent who had represented him for 15 years and hired a ‘business manager’, Michael Ovitz, who, he hoped, would market his technothrillers more lucratively in Hollywood. Most of what has happened to the book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good ...”

“... Carlos Williams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no question of the necessity of the examination: the child has a potentially fatal disease, it’s his duty to treat her. But the scene very quickly becomes animalistic, not the ...”

“... rank who will make you happy.’ A few years after he comes to power in 1969, Gaddafi traces the young woman, abducts her, arrests her husband, and has her father killed. Rank is a problem, or it used to be. The Brotherly Guide remembers how troubled he once was by a nagging uncertainty as to who, exactly, fathered him. As a boy he was told by his uncle that ...”

“... Home Rule was a step too far. Isabella Tod, who was born in Edinburgh but moved to Ulster as a young woman, was a pillar of progressive Gladstonian liberalism, the founder of the first Irish Women’s Suffrage Society and a champion of educational opportunities for girls, but when the Liberal Party split over Home Rule in 1886 she co-founded the Belfast ...”

“... charge was a matter for the prosecuting authorities. Not long afterwards the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, told the Commons more candidly: ‘One must realise that the 600-year-old statute is couched in such archaic language that it would be difficult to prove all the necessary ingredients of the crime and for a modern jury to come to grips with the ...”

“... Palestinians, 8200 became synonymous with dragnet policing and lethal aerial warfare. But for many young Israelis, a posting to the unit was an opening to a career, not an ideological commitment.I spoke to Avi, one of the organisers of the 2014 letter. We met in a park near Israel’s defence headquarters in Tel Aviv, surrounded by armed soldiers ordering ...”

“... a younger brother. Talk three (five minutes) was a conversation between two sisters, usually one young and one senior member of the congregation; either the younger woman would ask the older one about a practical or spiritual problem that the latter would help her resolve scripturally, or the senior member would demonstrate how to break the ice on the ...”

“... as well as a Momentum branch flag and a ‘Women for Corbyn’ banner. The crowd was largely young and white, but there was an older generation too – veterans of the struggle. Behind me a young man who had come with his mother dipped into a Waitrose bag and – perhaps eager to pre-empt the charge of champagne ...”