“... precisely thanks to postmodernism. That’s the idea behind Borges’s story of Pierre Menard, a French Symbolist who is led by his Symbolist background to produce a text identical to Don Quixote. Borges’s story, however, relies on our historical knowledge of Cervantes’s existence. The incredibly funny, thought-provoking claim that ‘Cervantes’s text ...”

“... Russian rabbinate had historically supported the anti-semitic Tsar against Bonaparte, viewing the French as bearers of secularism and enlightenment. The other is that he saw, in the attachment of many Jewish intellectuals to Marxism, a sort of displaced messianic impulse. This certainly aided his persistent misreading of Marx and of what he thought of as ...”

“... Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable ...”

“... nodding out for days at a time, blissfully insensible to the strangulated yips of their miniature French poodle, Bijou, no one would hire him. He started doing solo hold-ups and boosts to keep them supplied, cruising past East LA construction sites and making off with unguarded power tools. He got caught with a condom full of dope after one of these farcical ...”

“... for its emancipation of the subcontinent after the war – the finest hour, in the view of David Marquand, in Attlee’s career. The reality is that the transfer of power put through Parliament in the first week of July 1947, amid an outpouring of self-congratulation on all sides, was literally breakneck: not for those who voted it, but those who ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... cellars and hills, another was attacked round the clock from bases a few miles away, British and French aircraft taking off and landing at the rate of one a minute, dropping bombs and paratroops on Egypt. Failure to repossess the canal had no immediate impact on London’s determination to hold onto Cyprus. But with Eden’s departure, British policies began ...”

“... write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is accompanied by the dressmaker who has been ...”

“... we built a raft from old oil-drums, and, too afraid to sail on it ourselves, we tethered one of David Luck’s hapless chickens to its deck and sent it on a squawking unhappy journey downstream. Another time we constructed an elaborate camp on a small island in the middle of a pond with a rope drawbridge worked by discarded bell-ropes from the Church.I only ...”

“... towards the European Union. In 2015, as part of an effort to appease his enemies on the right, David Cameron’s incoming Conservative administration announced it was scrapping subsidies for onshore wind farms.When the Campbeltown factory tried to switch to the more politically palatable offshore wind towers, it had to deal with the towers getting ...”

“... would then finally come to an end, and Russians would simply live in their national home as the French or the Swedes in theirs. How,​ finally, should the particular trajectory of Russia be situated in a wider perspective? It was plain, Furman thought, that some logic or order existed in world history – it was not mere Brownian motion, but a patterned ...”

“... to mislead these people: what was on offer was not a ‘humanitarian war’ but an informal Camp David. ‘It needn’t even be the United States,’ he continued. ‘It could be a great man. It could be Nelson Mandela … or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the ...”