In August 1947 George Orwell nearly drowned himself, his infant son and his niece and nephew; and noticed some interesting activity by cormorants and puffins.

We may have left certain practices of our childhood and youth behind, but they haven’t gone away, you know.

The fables, Seamus Heaney has written, that corpus of tales of innocent or treacherous beasts and birds, were once part of the common oral culture of Europe, a store of folk wisdom as pervasive and unifying at vernacular level as the doctrines of Christianity were in the higher realms of scholastic culture.

As a child, Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz was bought a beautiful notebook. So beautiful he didn’t want to write anything unworthy in it.

Saul Bellow judged that many people he knew had made too much of an investment in the difficult texts of Marxism to ever accept that it no longer had very much to say about reality. Can we say that about any later intellectual fashions?

Miss Fox, of Fleet Street near Charing Cross, though of uncertain family, unknown fortune and indifferent parts, was a young woman of very definite opinions, many of them other people’s.

Modernising influences in Turkey tried to impose a purely Turkic language with a new alphabet in place of the rich mixture of Turkic, Arabic and Persian which had comprised the language of the Ottoman empire. This led to a few problems.

What kind of conspiracy is the European Union anyway? A Papist one, or a German one?

Some of our new fellow Europeans don’t like the government knowing their business. Sure, they’re only human.

Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, now 94, insists that the proper attitude for his countrymen and women to adopt to Poland involves a continuing humility and patience.