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“... long telephone-calls as members of the family tried to work out where the collection came from, who could have a right to it, who was double-crossing whom. Better sleuths were on the job, however. The papers were traced by the Sunday Times to Carlisle and a dealer in postal stamps, ...”

“... subsequently published. It was a frothing note from some Canadian business mogul named Black, who evidently hero-worshipped Ronald Reagan. In his closing sentences this entrepreneur speaks of buying up some English newspapers in order to put me, and others like me, out of a job. I had a brief cackle on the telephone with the Spectator’s then-editor and ...”

“... had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect who had designed the splendid new concert hall. On free afternoons he was a brain surgeon as well, or have I pinched that from later jokes? By page six of The Sieve of Time Leni Riefenstahl is a competitive swimmer and gymnast, aged 12. On page ten she is ...”

“... be. It supervenes on the second or terminal Big Bang of nuclear destruction, and it mops up those who escaped that event, on some variation of the principle that he who was born to be drowned shall never be banged. But Malamud’s Noah, a paleologist called Calvin Cohn (he changed his first name from Seymour, to the ...”

“... that Humboldt and Herder rightly belong. The new linguistics inaugurated by Saussure and Bréal (who comes out as a pioneer of greater stature than anyone has hitherto acknowledged) was a conscious reaction against the German-dominated pseudo-science of language foisted upon a gullible academic world by the more extravagant comparative philologists and ...”

“... as surprised as Papa is to be writing a letter. I have not written a letter in twenty years. But I guess not many of my friends have been looking to receive mail from me. You know I never had much trust in the mails, or pleasure from them, although I lived by them all those years. And it was many years Pos, you old putana, as you know. I put myself in ...”

“... We all know of writers who just keep writing the same book, but what is sadder is when a true writer seems to run out of books. T.S. Eliot observed that to continue to develop stylistically, a writer had to continue to develop emotionally … It is a commonplace of psychology that human beings, beyond a certain age, find it difficult to supplement their personalities with new emotional understandings ...”

“... people exercising their personal judgment, and not just blindly following the rules. For example, who wouldn’t prefer, when appearing before a judge, to learn that the judge was willing to hear each case on its merits, and exercise some discretion if necessary? General rules, we think, are likely to be discriminatory, because they cannot take account of ...”

“... over granite, no sinkholes.’ Not that she was referring to her own writing. You’ll have to guess who it was for the moment; it was an author she aspired to, one she had learned from, and one whose problems she does not always escape. Do you think you know what a ‘sinkhole’ is? I ask because I wasn’t sure I did. So I looked it up and a ...”

“... like, Modern Man? Well, he often seemed remote, as unreal as those perfect dads on television. I guess his life was altogether too newly out of the box for him to understand it, much less explain it to me. You know, many of our dads were veterans of World War Two or Korea, but those bloody paths to virility were not ones they sought to pass on. Why do you ...”

“... Hizbullah’. The session was to be chaired by a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, who is currently president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. I vaguely remembered coming across one of his books as an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University: Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. The second speaker was ...”

“... Tranquilina means ‘the Quiet Old Lady’ in Spanish. ‘She was a fabulous storyteller who could tell wild tales of the supernatural with a most solemn expression on her face. As I was growing up, I often wondered whether or not her stories were truthful. Usually, I tended to believe her because of her serious, deadpan facial expression. Now, as a ...”

“... questions: out of 74 talks, I spotted just one whose take-home message I couldn’t immediately guess. It was on ‘football, greed and the recession’, it was called ‘Who Ate All the Pies?’, and I’m afraid I don’t know the answer, because I went to ‘Rethinking Freedom in an Illiberal Age: Securing Rights or ...”

“... in a panic, and I hung up on her. The telephone rang again at once. This time it was Jeremy – who else? ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Hi. Sorry but this isn’t an awfully good moment – ’ ‘Oh, my dear, how awful. Are you all right? You sound a bit odd. If anything’s the matter I could always whiz straight round – ’ ‘Nothing’s the matter. I’ll ...”

“... Harris takes the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1968: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and Doctor Dolittle. Each of them was for one reason or another tough to make: the material and its treatment were so new, or the audience wasn’t ready for it, or the creative team involved in making ...”