In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

By the tits of Holy Agnes

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.