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“... In one of George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life a lady addicted to reading tracts skims rapidly over references to Zion or the River of Life, but has her attention immediately caught by any mention of ‘pony’ or ‘boots and shoes’. A reader of modern biographies can see why. The best things in them are usually the facts, the objects, the unexplained and inexplicable things that cluttered up the lives of the august and famous, as they do everybody else’s, and now find a place in the story ...”

“... In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail he kept from George Plimpton for years. His third novel, Raditzer (1961), depicts yet another young man of means resisting paternal influence: Charles Stark foregoes joining his father’s law firm to enlist in the navy just as the war is ending. Shipping out to the ...”

“... and was secretary of war under Taft, Roosevelt and Truman. Like his cousin (and both Presidents Bush) Loomis went to Andover and Yale, later moving on to Harvard Law School. He started his legal career as a clerk in Stimson’s New York law firm, subsequently acting as his cousin’s financial adviser, making him even richer through excellent stock-market ...”

“... In his history of the genre, Brian Aldiss suggests that most SF is what he calls ‘prodromic’: we must read it less as a prophecy of the future than as symptomatic of the present. By this rule 1984 will be 36 years out of date when we get there. A commoner view (on which Aldiss is naturally not so keen) holds that SF, like the Western, is an exclusively American line of fiction in which dabbling Europeans can easily make fools of themselves ...”

“... Sophie Blind, begins the novel dead, or so she tells us: she was decapitated by a car on Avenue George V in Paris, coming out of the hairdresser’s. It’s a comic death and the tone is deadpan. ‘It’s quite certain I am dead. It’s in the newspaper.’ Sophie could get used to her new situation. She spent her life preoccupied with being happy: ‘Now ...”

“... no paltry revelation of lousy morals among the morality-preaching classes. It was, at least until we learned of the Iran-Contra business, the most systematic attempt to convert the United States from a democratic republic into a junta with a civilian façade. Since it takes the part for the whole, and summarises the whole tapestry by the single thread by ...”

“... 12th-century exchequer. Next, after four centuries of inflation – job-title inflation anyway – we find the post of treasurer ennobled as lord treasurer or puffed up as far as lord high treasurer. In the 17th century, the office was put into commission, first in an ad hoc way and then permanently. Thus heroic social-climbing was succeeded by backstairs ...”

“... understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their bases in Germany, too. The many car parks’ worth of mine-proof vehicles you can see from Battlesbury ...”

“... discovered the shattered, melted wreckage resting on and around a vast termite mound in the bush, there was only one survivor: the American chief security officer and Korean War veteran, Sergeant Harold Julian. The remaining crew and passengers on the Albertina perished in the fireball that consumed the DC-6 when it hit the ground and broke ...”

“... blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene. How we dress now is a subject that engages semioticians, social historians, political analysts and gender theorists – ‘fashion civilians’, in the words of Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman – as well as superstar designers, magazine editors, high-spending ...”

“... to rouse moral indignation by means of sensationalism. Needless to say, it does not touch on how we might alleviate the situation of those whose misfortunes it describes, still less on why they, among all the unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help. Certainly no English man or woman would wish to be a German Jew in Germany ...”

“... that when the army reached the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, there would be another photo op, and we would be told that the complex had been secured. By 8 April, the US army was reported to have reached the Ministry of Information, two streets away from the museum. I emailed Pentagon staff, reminding them of the importance of the museum. In reply, they asked ...”

“... It has taken the entire century to bring Freud to the judgment of history. Whatever shall we do about Jung? His beginnings were not promising and his father frankly worried about him. Dominated by a mother at once unreliable and eerily intimate, the child was an asocial miscreant, rejected by his peers. Home was no better – the atmosphere was ‘unbreathable’ – and when he could not escape to the countryside the boy began to explore his own interior ...”

“... terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.’   Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it all mean? The ...”

“... of a new map for Israel, Diaspora Jews of all denominations are always unsure of their ground: if we choose not to live there, do we have a particular right to confront, head-on, those who do? Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Relations recognised the inevitability of this tension: following Sacks’s letter, he acknowledged ...”