“... you use a baseball bat or whatever, you’re going to want to be a responsible gun-owner. It may sound Pollyanna-ish, but if anything positive came out of 9/11 it was the notion that being American is not something defined by politics or class or education, but some humanity that draws us together. It was a rediscovery of the value of . . . every ...”

“... women conversing at a cocktail party, are the standing stones of Stenness. The purpose of these may be mysterious, but a short seven miles away is the Neolithic village Skara Brae. Preserved there is a huddle of roofless huts, dug half-underground into midden and sand-dune. You can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and ...”

“... Bowles later reported on the switchblade knife Cherifa kept handy to castrate ‘any male who may say good evening to her. Never knew a woman who hated men so violently. I’m told she makes a speciality of stealing brides on the eve of their weddings.’ Peter Owen, who published many of Bowles’s books, wrote: Jane’s maid, Sherifa (sic) placed a ...”

“... the tiger asserts the light of the inside, as well as the outside: the light that intelligence may cast on its own four walls, in addition to the wonderful and frightening foment of things in the world (their ‘wars’). And in this retrospective by an elderly man inclined to doubt his own gifts as well as what he knew, who leans breathlessly on ...”

“... The first letter in Welcome Home is from Lucia’s father, who writes hoping that, ‘though we may live on a mountain peak one year and in a black canyon the next, that our beautiful house will be built in our hearts’. He must have sensed the black canyon somehow. When he returned from the war, he moved the family first to Patagonia and then to ...”

“... and banners … with shining eyes replete with the cause and human fellowship’. The problem may be that she found women domestics less inspiring. In Italy, ‘the maids were afraid of her.’ In Sanary, ‘the house was kept going by a femme de ménage who came in the mornings, a dumpy woman, not too well disposed; we thought her a slut.’A Compass ...”

“... for the treatment because ‘they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.’ It may not seem the richest joke, but it has impeccable philosophical credentials, drawing as it does on Henri Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France Lewis had attended in the early years of the century. ‘We laugh every time a person gives us the ...”

“... anti-colonial activism angered the Portuguese secret police: he was forced into exile and in May 1960 settled in Conakry, capital of the neighbouring Republic of Guinea, which had become independent from France in 1958. Here, with the blessing of the Guinean president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Cabral set up the headquarters of the African Party for the ...”

“... as a Hollywood star, featured in ‘all-coloured’ musicals such as Stormy Weather (1943). From May 1934 until his sudden death in 1943 at the age of 39, he recorded a staggering 402 numbers for RCA (plus radio transcriptions), only 20 of them as a piano or organ soloist. During the same period, Armstrong recorded 235 numbers for Decca, the most commercial ...”

“... does not mean that men cannot act decently, and kindly, indeed that the men in our lives may not sometimes be better and more reliable than the women. But it does mean that there are no men, no people, who can ever claim to be entirely beyond its reach. It is always there in the background, incentivising, rewarding and giving cover to good men who ...”

“... worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film lovers’. Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ‘politician’ and ‘diplomat’. One Australian programmer compared him to ‘a sales rep for Cartier watches’. At the much ...”

“... talk’. In True Nature, his new biography of Matthiessen, Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his ...”

“... the director with ‘the occult touch’, that neglected giant etc etc etc. But stay, you may ask, how can a dead man, no matter how occult his touch, be the object of a quest? Aha! In that clifftop house he’d left a widow, she who was a legend in her own right. He had been her ultimate husband. First (silent movies) she’d hitched up with an ...”

“... we were the victims of the accident, though it didn’t feel like that. The two women, one of whom may have been the girl’s mother, had successfully put themselves forward as victims and got the lion’s share of the money. The money I had given to the real victim, the little girl, was doubtless confiscated by an adult. Throughout the whole drama she never ...”

“... held high! We are not ... If we persist as we are, who knows whether, a century from now, the time may have come to erase the word ‘Russian’ from the dictionary? ... We must build a moral Russia, or no Russia at all. Solzhenitsyn would have been better advised to follow Brodsky’s example. He has become yet another object of derision for the young, while ...”