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“... a tough dramatic alloy, delicate and robust at once: This paint was from Raphaelson’s, a small Sydney outfit who are amongst the best pigment makers in the world. In the five years I had been really famous I would use nothing else and now they had some new, very serious acrylic greens: permanent green, earth green, Jenkins green, titanium green, Prussian ...”

“... herbarium and mineral and zoological collections, he passed the letter on to the young James Smith, who happened to be taking breakfast with him, and suggested he ask his father to buy them for him. Mr Smith obliged, and the Linnean Society was born. But against this – and by that time Banks was much engaged with ...”

“... a sharp eye out for favouritism one way or the other. Liverpool v. Manchester, Mumbai v. Delhi, Sydney v. Melbourne, Madrid v. Barcelona: it’s a familiar sort of rivalry. Such is my wholly prejudiced, bullying and sneering preference for Glasgow, and so keen was I for evidence of a secret love expressed in code, that I read this book at times as if it ...”

“... was, in good part, a Jewish diaspora and it often settled in Jewish areas of North London, Perth, Sydney, New York or even in Israel itself. Although many such exiles maintained strong sympathetic links to ‘the movement’ – you can still hear tales of the golden age of South Africa’s Left in many houses in Golders Green or Highgate – only a minority ...”

“... an academic career in North America – Vice-President of the University of Toronto, President of Smith College. Her childhood memories, on a pastoral station deep in New South Wales, begin with the elemental force of the flat, baked earth, the endless horizon and the harsh light. This is the site of a ‘bush ethos’ which she characterises in familiar ...”

“... were beginning to sense that Frazer’s approach was a bit ‘Victorian’. One writer in the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, contrasted Frazer’s ‘pity’ for the poor savage – because he is so ignorant of the ‘blessings of civilisation’ – with the attitude of the radical young anthropologist of the new generation, who ‘usually envies ...”

“... selectively, finding value in Locke on government, or praising the free market philosophy of Adam Smith. Those were the days (to paraphrase Todd Gitlin) when the right got the White House and the left got the English departments, where the Enlightenment was seen as quaint at best and as the source of Western claims to superiority at worst. The battles of the ...”

“... later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun Pollock for South Africa. The Coloured all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira came to prominence in 1958, when he led a ‘non-white’ tour to Kenya. Some of his achievements on that tour were staggering – 46 runs off one eight-ball over; 225 ...”

“... Haven . . . New London . . . Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be ...”

“... by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He was also a veteran of several Nuremberg rallies, a pen-pal of Schacht’s, and had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece that gave the Nazi salute. Sydney made no secret of ...”

“... about its other author, Ilya Gridneff, an Australian journalist of Russian origin, born in Sydney in 1979 and currently working in Papua New Guinea for the Australian Associated Press, except that the DeWitt/Gridneff partnership doesn’t do much fracturing with footnotes. Epistolary structure and multiple avatars, yes, scans of original ...”

“... The RaidTen men raided​ a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue ...”

“... and less astringent productions like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), plus memories of Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, gave rise to a late-life idea of her as a treasurably naughty grande dame, all genteel camp and classily to-the-point prose. Others, however, saw her as a glamorous point of contact with developments on the Continent. She showed an interest ...”

“... Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, Nat King Cole (the After Midnight Sessions with Sweets Edison, Stuff Smith and Juan Tizol), Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys, Ray Charles. And towards the end of the day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful with the sandstone in the precincts of Lake Powell, we had a medley that included Clarence Williams ...”

“... someone will feel compelled to publish a good novel.’In July 1964 someone, in the shape of Cork Smith, an editor at Viking, was sufficiently compelled to offer Williams a contract. The novel was published as Stoner, after its central character, the following April, and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted ...”