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“... lithe, an inspired mimic. Everyone who met him, even those who disliked him, felt his vitality. David ‘Bunny’ Garnett noticed his ‘beautiful lively, blue eyes’, and that he was ‘very light in his movements’. He also maintained that Lawrence’s hair colour, or non-colour – it was reddish-fair – was characteristically working-class. When a ...”

“... the river. The defiant and cavalier spirit of free enterprise. They said the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace was a waste of money. They said the Festival of Britain wouldn’t pull the punters. This is a signal to the world: we can convert vision into actuality in the shortest possible space of time. You come up with the bread and we’ll give you the ...”

“... to make his case rests on his reputation as a demographer. ‘If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear,’ he writes near the beginning of the book, which contains extensive information on population trends and voting patterns, with additional material on an accompanying website. But the further he moves away from the data, the more his argument is ...”

“... of socialism involving a cast of two thousand actors, singers, musicians and dancers – at the Crystal Palace, and began to advocate overthrowing the British state as a necessary means to right the wrongs of empire and capitalism. He also took part in a concert in celebration of the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, an ally of Bertolt Brecht, whose music had ...”

“... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...”

“... had issued everyone with Pervitin tablets, a powerful methamphetamine and an early form of crystal meth. High and wide awake, the tank drivers crashed through the forest, hidden from aerial surveillance by the canopy of fresh leaves. Blitzkrieg required its fighters to be on meth, as Norman Ohler has shown in his book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi ...”

“... Hospital, you are high up enough to see London surrounded by its hills. Harrow and Hampstead, Crystal Palace and Richmond. Hugh’s bed was by an east-looking window; Westminster in the distance, to the north the two unmistakable tower blocks of Notting Hill. The Trellick Tower to the north, the Campden Hill Towers at the Gate itself. I thought of my ...”

“... and his effort to write his name: ‘The beads of sweat grew on his low brow like transparent crystal boils ... These boils ran, ran down like tears wept by Onufrij’s brain.’ And from The Emperor’s Tomb: ‘All little stations in all little provincial towns looked alike throughout the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Small and painted yellow, they were ...”

“... or in Down and Out in Paris and London, is one to be accused of doubting the word of ‘the crystal spirit’, of destroying his reputation for integrity and honesty, or is one paying tribute to a craftsman less naive than some of the Chelsea and Bloomsbury literary friends of the days of his fame enthusiastically assumed him to be? Orwell valued his ...”

“... The papers are full of the beastliness of Eric Cantona who kicked some loud-mouthed, pop-eyed Crystal Palace supporter and got himself suspended for it ... for ever, some soccer lovers hope. Currently Walker’s Crisps are running a TV advert in which Gary Lineker, returning home from Japan, sits on a park bench beside a little boy and then, saying ‘No ...”

“... direct language would do. There’s so much space in them that they seem to hang in the air like crystal mobiles, fragile and scintillating. The smudgy harmonies and almost modal shape of the melodies makes them sound as if derived from an unidentifiable musical tradition: people suggested ancient Greek; Venusian might have been closer. Debussy, whom Satie ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... because he foresaw no alternative within the existing social order, was an instance of his crystal ball functioning with particularly high resolution. Marx puts great pressure on the question of where value comes from, how commodities are exchanged and what money is. It’s a very simple question but not one that had been asked with such clarity ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.I ...”