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“... Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic passion; the other, subtlety, irony and world-weary cynicism. One displayed such restless physical energy that contemporaries repeatedly reached for that newly hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot ...”

“... The Old Way was Realist, teaching that universals have a real existence: the notion ‘Man’ represents something real, individual men are imperfect copies of it. Realists invoked Scotus and Aquinas. The rival Moderni had swept across Europe from Oxford and Paris. They were Nominalists, teaching that universals such as ‘...”

“... discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually reveal Clara’s emotional failure; Miriam Leivers’s polemic against sexual inequality reveals her lack of ‘healthy ...”

“... time, my mother was stopped in the street by a neighbour and asked: ‘Is your husband a black man?’ Not only were blacks as rare in Ulster as Albanians, but the neighbour in question was well-acquainted with my father’s appearance. ‘No, he’s English, actually,’ my mother replied, to which the neighbour returned: ‘Is he walking the ...”

“... mood-changer. Here are two examples, one English and one American, both extremely accomplished. Paul Bailey, with several distinguished novels to his credit already, is a master of this mode. The action of Old Soldiers, the Aristotelian space from the beginning through the middle to the end, occupies only a couple of weeks (and 120 thinly printed ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... the conclusion of the war: was it inevitable that it would end in independence (supposedly de Gaulle’s own belief)? To answer these questions we need access to contemporary documents, and the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (created by Louvois in 1668), which had ...”

“... forces policing the social appearance of the subject. Exactly! Had Claude Cahun not existed, Man – or a Gender Theorist – would have had to invent her. Something more is needed now: some real homage. The images remain: freakish, unsettling, impossible to ignore – Scenes from a Funhouse Mirror. In one photo the mercurial Cahun impersonates a bald ...”

“... with the Chinaman lasted almost two years. After the popular romances of Delly and the novels of Paul Bourget, Marguerite delved into Shakespeare and Molière. Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged ...”

“... myths that punish artists for ambition (Marsyas, Arachne etc). Randall Jarrell said a poet is a man who spends a lifetime standing out in thunderstorms waiting to be struck by lightning; that was a metaphor for inspiration, though a literal interpretation also suggests itself. Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me ...”

“... many of these, including volcanoes with precise eschatological trimmings (‘I saw an elderly man in braces showered by sulfur and brimstone’) and a negative version that goes not with a bang but with a whimper: It is not like a massacre, not like a bomb; there is no blood, nobody’s being mangled; it is just a swelling, a steady increase, all over ...”

“... murdered on 17 June 1914 in a forest on the outskirts of Berlin. The murderer was presumed to be a man she met through a personal ad, Paul Kuhnt, who made off with her keys and plundered her apartment. He was tried for her murder but not convicted. Carrington uses the case notes from the murder investigation to bring to ...”

“... nostalgia and desire such erotic tableaux as the steeples of Martinville, or the spectacle of Mlle de Vinteuil and her friend pursuing each other round the table with the absorption and the awkwardness of large birds, or the moment before the hotel at Balbec when the narrator is accused by Charlus of the solecism of having anchors embroidered on his bathing ...”

“... of sniffing commentators: can no one remember how it is for the young woman confronting the older man, so seductively marked by experience, so essentially powerful, always knowing you better than you know yourself? The entire affair would, I imagine, have reminded them of their relations with Olga Kosakiewicz, who began as Beauvoir’s pupil and went on as ...”

“... best room in an overbooked hotel. In Poland for the papal visit in 1991, he’s so moved by John Paul II’s demeanour, conducting a six-hour open-air ceremony, that he seems to get close to re-conversion. ‘There was something about the singing, the colours and the beauty of the words which reminded me of strange, hard-won moments of pure contentment I had ...”