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“... that her clearing of an apartment between the walls of her house has revealed layer after layer of former inhabitants, and brought to light a ‘bright green lawn under thunderous and glaring clouds and on the lawn, a giant black egg of pockmarked iron, but polished and glassy around which, and reflected in the black shine, stood Emily, Hugo, Gerald, her ...”

“... and complained about having to say grace before meals – not at all the habit of an irreligious former choirboy. He was ready for something new, and when a fresh wave of American composers, influenced by John Cage, arrived at the annual Darmstadt summer school to sample the European experience – and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the ...”

“... and what a difference a few years has made. Cage is now 27 and has left behind any of his former regard for European classicalism. He asks Thomson if he might be interested in writing something for percussion and reports with pride that his group already performs works by key experimental composers such as Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer and Lou ...”

“... Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because as I’ve recently discovered, a source other than Alexander Selkirk’s narrative stirred Defoe’s imagination, and points to the ...”

“... locating their obscurity in the mystery of inwardness. The phrase belongs to William Rubin, the former curator of 20th-century painting and sculpture at MoMA, but the tradition extends back to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Braque and Picasso’s dealer, who offered his own accounts of Cubism in terms derived from Kantian metaphysics. That tradition, Clark ...”

“... the medical director of having aimed too high, too quickly, and of having bewildered his unhappy pupil by allowing him to see his exasperation.’ Publishing that sentence in 1971 doubtless required a cushion of arrogance about Sartre’s own reputation in the year 2096. Yet perhaps this arrogance is not quite what it seems. There are times – many times ...”

“... a different title. Dunning, who teaches sociology at the University of Leicester, was once a pupil of Elias; he remains a devotee, but the focus of his interests is rather different. Elias originally used the history of changing styles in what he calls ‘sport-games’ (defined in a footnote as ‘football, rugby, tennis, cricket, golf etc’) to ...”

“... young man about fifteen years of age, of active, studious and erotic disposition’, a star pupil at his school, who had been much troubled by sexual urges until he discovered to his delight the expedient of masturbation. For about a year he had masturbated two or three times a day. But he then became worried by certain supposed symptoms of ill-health ...”

“... from the blue, so to speak, came the ‘Sixties’, first in Indonesia, then in Chicago. In the former, political polarisation had been steadily deepening in the second half of the Fifties, very much along the faultlines acutely analysed in The Religion of Java. The country’s first and only free elections were held in 1955, and showed a vast new ...”

“... Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was eleven before he could read fluently and at twenty he wrote like a child’. Instead, Roberts shows us a youth, not brilliant perhaps, but ...”

“... people in various stages of cancer treatment aren’t a group anyone wants to be a part of. My former mother-in-law went to the Bristol centre for alternative cancer therapy and in between juicing fields-worth of carrots, complained until her own death about the letters she regularly received from spouses, informing her that one of their group had ...”

“... above all about the importance of a good education. The younger brother, Réné, was a brilliant pupil but Maurice’s shyness and stammer held him back. He failed the oral exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure three times and, after serving without fighting for a year during the war, went in 1941 to study in Clermont-Ferrand, the future snow-covered ...”

“... counter-revolution was beaten back in the west – the popular leader of the Vendée, the former carter Cathelineau, ‘Saint of Anjou’, fell in the attempt to storm it – and in its wake the Terror was most ferocious: at night, in the noyades, thousands were drowned in the river by the Jacobin emissary Carrier. Under the Restoration, the solitary ...”

“... worked at Collins and at Chatto, as well as being an editor-at-large at the Literary Review and a former deputy editor of the London Magazine. He has written well-received biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, and has already published three volumes of autobiography, the last entitled Grub Street Irregular. Now he has written a book which is, the ...”

“... to the bitter end. Last autumn was one of them. In September, two people were stabbed outside the former offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. In October, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine suburb of Paris, was beheaded after he showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils during a civics class ...”