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“... samba, and the list of headline novelists conspicuously omits any name from the land of Machado de Assis, the most ingenious 19th-century practitioner of the form outside Europe. Today Northern readers are more likely to get an impression of Brazil from Peruvian bombast than from any native fiction. If the largest society in the Southern hemisphere remains ...”

“... Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress ...”

“... be open over the vein, and then when I fixed I could say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He’s hungry, jack!’ You know. ‘Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man’s hungry. He needs some blood!’ You can see some of the tattoos in the super-grotty ex-felon pic of him – a cadaverous Nan Goldin-style ...”

“... Deciding to be a groupie instead, she raced through the LA art and music scenes. ‘In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,’ Earl McGrath, later the president of Rolling Stones Records, said. ‘It’s usually Eve Babitz.’ Ed Ruscha disagreed:Even if she acted like a groupie, though, she never was. Groupies are passive, bounce off whoever ...”

“... took away the guitars, then turned them up unprecedentedly loud, made Lydon sound like a drowning man one minute, a Smurf the next. ‘The idea,’ according to Keith Levene, PiL’s brittle-looking and sounding guitarist, ‘was to break through conditioning.’ The following year, they produced a second album, Metal Box. It came packaged as a circular film ...”

“... in finding a position abroad. For the next five years, Cavell was governess to the children of Paul François, a well-off Brussels lawyer. The children remembered her as a kind and imaginative teacher, but also as very proper and very English: the self-repression that would strike later acquaintances had already marked her character. To her ...”

“... because that was when his father went, turned 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 ...”

“... that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the only – way for a community to get effective flood defences in Britain is to be badly ...”

“... that Berryman began to write his Dream Songs with a song he later ‘killed’: The jolly old man is a silly old dumb with a mean face, humped, who kills dead. There is a tall who loves only him. She has sworn ‘Blue to you forever, Gray to the little rat, go to bed.’ I fink it’s bads all over.It ends: Henry and Mabel ought to but can’t. Childness ...”

“... creature who will identify an innocent colleague with the mole he is hunting and kill the wrong man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters ...”

“... You really cannot tell fully about a thing until the man’s work is all there,’ Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan ...”

“... cultivated life and an education’. They would make better photographs, he claimed, because ‘a man who has faith, intelligence and cultivation will show that in his work. Fine photography is literature, and it should be.’ These seemingly opposed and simple approaches were not opposed or simple at all, and together they constitute the basis of his ...”

“... much other than malaria and syphilis (‘and nobody was going to get up in court and say: “That man failed to cure my clap.” ’) Where once the profession’s main therapeutic resource was the bedside manner, and the patient’s principal response gratitude, Bonney argued, people now expected to be cured and would sue if they were not. The argument rang ...”

“... and the offence must be carried out ‘without reasonable excuse or justification’ – a de facto public interest test. To have conspired in the misconduct, a journalist had to know, or be in a position where they should have known, that the official’s actions met all these criteria. Knowing the official was breaking their terms of employment ...”

“... the war, by publishing her in Les Temps modernes and writing a preface for her novel Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948). (The war between antediluvian existentialists and cool modernists had not yet started.) Without the advent of the ‘new novel’ in the 1950s, Sarraute’s career might not have taken off at all. But it did take off, and towards the end of ...”