“... near enough to tell us what we need to know about Antonia or Jim or the professor, Godfrey St Peter, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. She observes her characters respectfully, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ploughed ...”

“... later career. Nonetheless, the story he tells so skilfully is susceptible to more than one reading. Jenkins’s social trajectory has sometimes been represented as a classic rags-to-riches story, but the reality was more complex (to his credit, Jenkins himself rarely attempted to play the proletarian card). It is true that his father began his working ...”

“... force. Sometimes, in order to get people to do what you want, it is necessary to coerce them. Reading this book, you would never know this was an option. It isn’t that Brown denies that it happens. He describes plenty of moments when people use communication to bully, threaten and coerce, rather than to persuade. It’s just that when this happens, it ...”

“... in his youth. The partnership has inspired plays and novels, from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee. Its apotheosis, in this picaresque sense, is the notorious occasion at Trebon Castle in southern Bohemia, when the spirits revealed to Kelley their wish that he and Dee should ‘hold their wives in common’. That Jane Dee ...”

“... never happened, though he undermines his case somewhat by saying it wouldn’t have been like him. Reading Kavanagh, I was often reminded of biographies of Alexander the Great: there are the same disagreements over what actually happened, despite numerous eyewitnesses, and the same attempts on the part of his fans to put the most positive spin on the most ...”

“... in static numerical patterns.This concentration, however, is the quality we consume in our unique reading, and which has no real equivalent in The Tin Drum, say, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Midnight’s Children, even though their momentum is analogous, as are the associations from which their episodes are constructed. We have no ready-made literary-technical ...”

“... is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period souvenirs, so skilled at avoiding most emotions apart from the fake ones. Though actually, I wasn’t impressed by the period detail in Misbehaviour ...”

“... I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’. He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s ...”

“... still lively and pert. And she showed me lots of old family photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home ...”

“... is not what you have but what you choose to do with it. Still, we should be careful about reading too much into the fact that the Athenians decided to spend their windfall on a public good (the navy) rather than dividing it up into a series of private goods (individual handouts). After all, they had another advantage when it came to making this ...”

“... of photographers like Atget and Sander. In a rare essay on Lorck’s drawings from 1955, Peter Ward-Jackson noticed ‘the hallucinatory quality’ of his work, ‘the morbid trend of his imagination’ and ‘his predilection for the weird and the sinister’. Lorck practised bizarre conjunctions and often communicates a cold absorption in his ...”

“... turned to the new president, at which Thatcher tapped the side of her skull and said: ‘Peter, there’s nothing there.’ And after she had left office, Nicholas Henderson, her ambassador in Washington between 1979 and 1982, told Tony Benn: ‘If I reported to you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage ...”

“... Alexander Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West that he had the ‘impression from a fairly faithful reading of Dorothy Thompson in the Herald Tribune that she may sail at any minute in order to strangle Neville Chamberlain’.After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, opinion pollsters asked Americans to what extent they were in favour of aiding European ...”

“... horrific civil wars of the 20th century. The CIA never fully corrected its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics until after bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on 7 August 1998. A co-operative agreement between the US and Pakistan was anything but natural or based on mutual interests. Only two weeks after radical ...”

“... roman-à-clef, Sacred Paths to Wilful Freedom, circulated in samizdat in the early 1970s, only by reading the account in Nathans’s book – but I certainly recognised the combination of admiration, pity and, above all, irritation that her female protagonist felt about her impractical layabout dissident husband. Zlobina’s all too accurate reportage was ...”