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“... I imagine, to furnish a famous author with a subject. When I arrived at the leprosarium as a young doctor, I had a fierce battle with some of the missionary sisters regarding the care of the patients, a quarrel between ancients and moderns. It was the perfect scenario for a Greene novel. I did not say a word about it. Twenty-five years later, when we ...”

“... unwelcome advice I’d been given and went every day to a place in Kensington High Street where young women were taught a few secretarial skills. On my first morning, as I came out of the Tube, I was alarmed to hear someone shouting a bit further up the road. ‘Alarmed’ because I thought something might be required of me. A minute later a mad woman ...”

“... going to an unexciting location and reporting on his lack of excitement; Jonathan Raban and Hugo Williams purvey this mode as well. Is it that old-style travellers chose their destinations better? Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by reporting their ...”

“... the distribution of arms to the people. Calling out the titles in lewd or gloating fashion, young soldiers supervised by Ricardo Samos, an ambitious local lawyer, cast books into the flames as if in preparation for Spain’s shutters being closed. ‘Does God Exist? Aurora Library. No more questions, Aurora, darling! Victor ...”

“... the movements and ideas enthusing Europe in the heyday of liberalism. They read Michelet, Heine, Hugo and Darwin, joined in the cult of Garibaldi, and supported Polish and Irish independence. Eça soon embraced the doctrine of literary realism – another liberal battle-cry – and became its Portuguese spokesman. He announced that the artist’s function ...”

“... He became a participant in the salons at which he’d once been exhibited: a social ornament, a young man of genius, an artist with all the necessary attributes – long hair, aquiline features, sultry expression and eyes that seemed to peer into one’s soul. Almost until the day he died, women found him irresistible; the number of his affairs is ...”

“... camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of Scargill, fear of ...”

“... While many of its leading figures were war veterans, the overwhelming majority of members were too young to have experienced the war. They were men in search of violent means to avenge themselves on those they held responsible for Germany’s defeat. This ‘war youth’ generation was won over in particular by the militant masculinity of the brownshirt ...”

“... of historians. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against devotional Soviet characterisations ...”

“... block where Louise, played by Pascale Ogier, lives with her architect boyfriend. We watch the young woman as she walks up and down the stairs in her apartment, with its unframed Mondrian prints hanging on the wall, tennis rackets in one corner, fabrics, paints and plants in another. Nothing is rushed in this opening: we are simply encouraged, as ...”

“... de tout’. There is no doubt that Tristan lived and wrote in the shadow of his father. His young imagination was possessed by the many books his father had written before his son’s birth. Edouard Corbière’s novels were all of a piece: blood-and-thunder sea-stories, tales of wild adventure, reckless passion and sudden fortune. Edouard was talented ...”

“... people actually wanted to read, it was a scarce commodity). In it, Soviet readers devoured Scott, Hugo, Dickens, Dumas, Balzac, Twain and Remarque. Encouraged by Russian and Soviet tradition to ‘live’ a work of literature and model themselves on fictional protagonists, they entered these literary worlds with enthusiasm, finding as much scope for ...”

“... literature of our times. I was living in a civilisation which despised the old and worshipped the young. But somehow I never took these dire threats seriously. I belong to an old tribe and I knew that literature thrives best on ancient faith, timeless hopes, and illusions. Singer has always stood out against the lures of Modernism. The strength of his ...”

“... up the chords to a gigantic bust of Beethoven which bisects the horizon like an Alp. Dumas père, Hugo, a trousered, cigarette-smoking Sand, a spindly Paganini and a tubby Rossini look on in admiration. Of the eight faces, only Marie d’Agoult’s is invisible. She is seen from behind, sitting on the floor, her head resting on the piano, in imminent danger ...”

“... which meant that for most of the 20th century it was deemed best to be rich, white, thin and young. In the England of Enninful’s youth, this meant Sloaney blondes with big hair and big shoulder-pads. In America, it was society women with famous surnames and huge clapboard houses on the coast of Maine. Paris Vogue was much the same, just with nipples ...”