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“... with equivocal evidence. Thwarted by heavy seas and thick mists, he glimpsed, but would not set foot on (he sent a deputy in his place), a coast that stretched as far as he could see from the north-east to the south. As a potential grande terre, it was named Kerguelen Land and claimed for the King of France. In 1773, Kerguelen was sent back to verify his ...”

“... commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible rhythm’. Some of the Penguin contes seem locked ...”

“... towards them with daunting confidence, and before long you are right up beside those thousand-foot-high buildings, looking among them from the circling elevation of the road as the chasms of the streets flicker past. They have an extraordinary presence, the glamorous giants of the Seventies and Eighties half-obliterating surviving brick-clad structures ...”

“... a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7 a.m., and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening. Following Connolly, what this says about London I’m not absolutely sure: all I do know is that after doing a couple of these radial walks ...”

“... creation, ‘invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his finger nails’. In 1934 Paul Claudel was celebrating ‘a pure gaze, bare, sterilised, washed of all substance, of an ingenuousness in some ways mathematical or angelic’. The fictional re-creations of Vermeer’s private life – elusive in much the same way as Shakespeare’s – by ...”

“... returning soldiers, sketched with much circumstantial detail by Parker as a great migration – on foot, on bicycles, in motor cars – was also a symbolic act of repossession. ‘Never before have so many people been searching for England,’ H.V. Morton wrote in his blowsy Baedeker of 1927, In Search of England. They were looking for something which many of ...”

“... have been removed ... If possible, keep the head, upper part of the body, arms etc, at least one foot away from the can ... [there must be] absolutely no talking, coughing, clearing of the throat, or any movement whatsoever of the lips. As David Thomson remarks in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, this was a life ‘so primed for legend, it leaves one ...”

“... Rhodesia (now Zambia); of Nyasaland (now Malawi). He instigated the Jameson Raid to overthrow Paul Kruger’s Boer republic in the Transvaal; he helped to develop the Witwatersrand goldfields; he returned again and again to the idea of setting up a ‘secret society’, which would bring about the domination of the world by ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’. The ...”

“... in the police van was only designed for one person? Could Pulley account for the fact that the six-foot fence Howe allegedly jumped over backed onto railings? All nine defendants were acquitted of the main charges. The judge determined that there was ‘evidence of racial hatred on both sides’, the first such acknowledgment of racism in the Met.British ...”

“... Pachamamas … angels with guns, and things like that.’ In Dream (The Indians Kill the Pope), Paul VI is shown at prayer, surrounded by a cast of figures in traditional dress. In another work, Fidel Castro flaunts one naked foot and sticks out a finger so that Allende can pass him a butterfly. Karl Marx, in a halo of ...”

“... on some rails laid through an apple orchard.Everything recurs. Nothing gets lost in the desert, Paul Bowles writes. ‘Wichtiges kommt wieder,’ is the way German puts it: important things return. But perhaps one doesn’t know that. Hence Hrabal’s gushing sentences, his spiral or circular forms, his pages written for ‘the luxury of diagonal ...”

“... personality we know very little, is ranked among the greatest of theologians, next only to St Paul and St Augustine. Of his publications, the centrepiece is the dauntingly hefty Summa Theologiae. In its dry, brisk, low-key manner, this formidable compendium of theology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology ranges from Thomas’s celebrated demonstrations of ...”

“... He flexed his knuckles and brought one hand up to join the other. The arch of his right foot tautened and the slack weight of his body hung between these extremities, slung like a carcass from a pole. He could not hold himself here for long. A vague outswelling created an overhang whose brow rolled back out of sight. He thought of the arc his arm ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”