“... if (as is likely) they reject his own tight-lipped explanation or suspect him of a proud pose. By coincidence, Thesiger’s book appears along with Worlds Apart by Gavin Young, of ‘slow boat’ fame, who once aspired to follow him into the Empty Quarter of Arabia, but settled instead for a stint in the lands of Sumer ...”

“... Commons and justice minister. His book’s title, Last Man Standing, derives from the curious rule by which the lord chancellor (which Straw became in 2007, at the same time as being secretary of state for justice) is the last member of an outgoing government to resign. But it could as well be called ‘The Making of a ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... his tone allows all kinds of intriguing questions to creep in. What kind of Hellenist could one be without a knowledge of Greek? Could one be one at all? How deep was Borges’s ignorance of the language? Asked once whether he knew any Sanskrit, he said: ‘Only the Sanskrit everybody knows.’ The essay itself is full of ...”

“... deplored the consequent shift in power towards capital, since the essential objective ought to be a wider spread of wealth among the majority, without which the current unpopularity of state socialism was likely to prove temporary. It was after 6 o’clock when he sat down. On Friday, as so often before, he caught the plane up to Orkney, in his old ...”

“... is what they want to take from you.’ A man explaining that bathing in cold water reduced his age by three years. An animated frog. A group of Mormon mothers performing a synchronised dance routine, then squabbling about their infidelities in a series of reels. Shitposts. Earnest sadposts. Thirst traps. A bulging man who eats raw organ meat and calls himself ...”

“... Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In other respects, it was already in existence. In the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, a king was determined by his people, not his territory. Physical ...”

“... pay the interest on the one before last. How, I wondered at the outset, can the commercial bankers be so foolish as to lend if there is a good chance they will not get their money back? The answer emerges that it is Sampson who believes they might not get their money back – not the bankers. Do the bankers then delude themselves? If so, why? The answer to the ...”

“... and apolitical as a chef who is preoccupied with his craft – though an exception might have to be made for the trusty employed by the Borgias. Frenchmen, perhaps, are too realistic, or live too closely to their chefs, to subscribe to this view: it was a Frenchman who reminded the world that an army marches upon its ...”

“... established politics is obviously difficult, and is still unresolved. But it ought at least to be an intellectual responsibility to look at what this movement is really saying. Rudolf Bahro, who wrote The Alternative and was imprisoned and then released in East Germany, is one of its most articulate spokesmen. He is a Marxist who has taken a position in ...”

“... The most valuable prize ever awarded for a work of fiction was the $150,000 put up by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1948 for Ross Lockridge’s epic of the American Civil War, Raintree County. The prizegiver’s motive in setting up this award was venal. They wanted to spawn a blockbuster series of ‘books of the film’ in the manner of Gone with the Wind ...”

“... per annum. From the 1870s onwards, government stock was regarded with little more than contempt by active investors; it was for widows and orphans. It had not always been like that. Throughout the 1820s, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, over half of all government expenditure went on servicing the huge national debt, on paying high rates of interest ...”

“... was the least pretentious of writers. He wanted to write exciting narratives, books which could be ‘devoured face downwards on one’s bed’. (Life: A User’s Manual is a rather bulky volume for this purpose, though it qualifies in other respects.) Nevertheless he was a dedicated avant-gardist whose best works were inspired ...”

“... to write the history of World War Two, its ramifications or antecedents. Nor is his story going to be a systematic study of American (or British, or for that matter, Soviet) occupation of what was the Third Reich. He is interested in the human story, in the wounded sensibilities of occupier and occupied, of victor and vanquished. He finds a country devastated ...”

“... first cookery book in 1960, as part of my trousseau. It was called Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, a Penguin paperback with a seductive pink jacket depicting a large family at table – evidently not a British family, for its members, shirt-sleeved, aproned, some of them children, were uncorking bottles, slicing ...”