“... with Meursault, the murderous colonising other, and soon enough we realise we’re reading both novels at the same time. Like Vendredi, Michel Tournier’s subaltern rewrite of Robinson Crusoe, Meursault, contre-enquête wrests the narrative away from the settler. In his fruitless search through L’Etranger for a sign of his brother’s ...”

“... Worms (1999) looks at the way Freud’s death is narrated in biographies by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay. There are plenty of differences, but both biographers need to see Freud as ‘the master of self-mastery’. Jones in particular, flying in the face of all the psychoanalytic evidence, presents him as ‘a remarkably consistent, heroically unified ...”

“... life, but if he did, he did it so successfully that his enterprises no longer stand out in relief. Reading these books, I have remembered the reason: it was to do with the way he had supported Mrs Thatcher and, I felt, distorted the democratic process in the 1980s. Now, though, I think Murdoch’s support cuts both ways, and did so even at the time. Page gives ...”

“... intellectual history. Things could only get better, and the first sign that they were doing so was Peter Gay’s magnificent study, The Enlightenment (1966). Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities of Nazi Germany before the war, and his ‘comprehensive interpretation’ of 18th-century thought was in part an expression of gratitude to the ...”

“... was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic sanitary standards afforded to older people. He reserved special contempt for the former workhouses, where inmates wore institutional clothing (sometimes bearing the names ...”

“... much as Forster feared when deploring Gide and Lubbock. Forster of course knew well enough that reading stories requires of us fairly complex operations which familiarity has enabled us to regard as simple. Let me offer an example of a feat of reading we all do very easily, but which could be made to seem arcane if one ...”

“... to his prep school headmaster, but not scholarly or perceptibly clever. He preferred talking to reading – an Astor trait – and kept a beagle pack and a polo pony. In his last year at Eton winning the hurdles was his only distinction, and he dropped out of Balliol after two years of PPE. Overwhelmed by the combination of recrimination and possessiveness ...”

“... Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world more open and connected’. A non-Facebooker reading that is likely to ask: why? Connection is presented as an end in itself, an inherently and automatically good thing. Is it, though? Flaubert was sceptical about trains because he thought (in Julian Barnes’s paraphrase) that ‘the railway would merely ...”

“... rather than conflate, the two separate criteria to which the Court is to have regard? On re-reading the chapter in the Report which deals with the Court of Appeal, I find myself still in two minds. Although I am strongly attracted to the catch-all Scottish principle – is there or might there be a miscarriage here, or should the verdict stand? – I ...”

“... of a message delivered by Nestor. In the dream Agamemnon is told that Troy is about to fall. In Peter Green’s translation:But now listen well: I bring word to you from Zeus,who though far distant greatly cares for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the ...”

“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”

“... A slight dust storm moves us indoors, where we sit around a big table, pecking at our laptops, reading news agency reports and emails. No place on earth is now too remote for men to be reached by emails from the merchants of penis enlargement. Much time is wasted as a result of this technology. It is supposed to enable you to gather more information, and ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... Holocaust, or that their leaders have encouraged this interpretation: both adhere to a theological reading of history based on mythic repetition, in which any violence against Jews, regardless of the context, is understood within a continuum of persecution; they are incapable of distinguishing between violence against Jews as Jews, and violence against Jews in ...”

“... a 43-year-old former flight attendant who charged a line of police with an industrial wheelie bin. Peter Lynch, 61, joined a mob that tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham; he was carrying a placard condemning the ‘deep state’, the World Health Organisation and Nasa. In Bristol, Ashley Harris, the 36-year-old owner of a scaffolding ...”