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“... of him?’ Carrère asks himself, or the reader, before whisking us back to the early 1980s, when Edward Limonov – Ukrainian émigré poet, recently down and out in New York – arrives in Paris, ‘crowned by the success of his scandalous novel, It’s Me, Eddie’. Limonov is a comet blazing across the local literary cosmos ‘where I’, Carrère tells ...”

“... male narrator, Rowan Anderson, is a historian, albeit one with the right kinds of ‘sympathy’: he is engaged on the biography of a woman engineer who contributed to the war effort against German Zeppelins by developing a powerful arc lamp. Anderson may (or may not) manage the biography: he certainly cannot manage his ...”

“... missing from courtship and from marriage. This is a position particularly associated with Edward Shorter, whose Making of the Modern Family defends the view that it was capitalism and the rise of industry 150 years after the time described by Quaife which introduced these things into the emotional lives of the mass of the population. No one can read ...”

“... item of apparel offered for view. The stranger approaching from a distance reads the hat before he sees the face or figure and, at a glance, learns a lot about the person beneath it. It is not so long ago that hats played a critical role in signifying social status. Upper and upper-middle-class men wore top hats, made of beaver or silk, in black or ...”

“... to the battles over enclosure of common lands, and to the poaching wars so well described by Edward Thompson and Harry Hopkins? What is the history of the plant auction? Was there a Victorian market in topsoil, peat, turf? When was the sprinkler introduced? What happened to experiments using human guano as a fertiliser? Weren’t a lot of the innovations ...”

“... They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of the dove of the Holy Ghost and handed on to Luther the baker, bent over his kneading tub. The Church hierarchy refuse the product. Behind looms a peasant with his flail, while a dragon shrieks excommunication. This graphic ...”

“... something yet. Burns himself was never to win through to crazy age, with its ‘something yet’: he died young, at the age of 37 – en poète, as he put it – of a rheumatic affliction of the heart caused or assisted, it would seem, both by work and by drink. So you could say that ...”

“... occasion, for various reasons. No novelist has made such a job of it as Henry James. In July 1905 he began the task of revising his life’s work, in order to create a final statement, a complete collection of his works, called from its inception the New York Edition. James actually believed that this gigantic labour would be financially rewarding, would ...”

“... long protected him; his ever-worsening alcoholism; and his insistence on a style of living which he could not afford and which drove him into dependence on Poulson and others. The fascination of Lewis Baston’s excellent study lies largely in the unfolding inevitability of this morality tale. The movement from the young Maudling, working genially alongside ...”

“... Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden, must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour ...”

“... In the introduction​ to A Visible Man, the mid-career autobiography of Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Enninful describes his work: ‘I’ve always answered the question of what it means to create a magazine differently … to push harder, to dream bigger.’ The rest of the book is his attempt to show what pushing harder and dreaming bigger has looked like in the thirty years since he started in fashion ...”

“... to the use of business people, politicians, sports fans and even women. As for the compiler, he is a teacher in New York and has contributed round-ups of quotations to the New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal and – since he is no prude – to Playboy. The American orientation of the book is very strong: so strong ...”

“... to boast of anything as limiting as an obsession. But there are persistences, continuities, as he calls them in the title of one of his books. There is an interest in difficulty, for example, and especially the difficulty of understanding – either oneself or others. This interest is not discouraging, or downhearted. On the contrary. But it never turns ...”

“... to me to have done a very able job (Vols II and III). David Chibbett (Vol. I) is another matter. He (or the author) has apparently set the style for names. We are given Onono Komachi and Ariwarano Narihira, which is rather like Johann Wolfgang Vongoethe or Michel Demontaigne. Neither the original nor the translation gives enough care to Japanese ...”

“... who was born in Alexandria, visited Cairo in 1938 to whip up support for his idea of modernity: he had found a messiah in Mussolini and his arrival caused a storm. The leading figure in the Cairo group of fighters for art and freedom was Georges Henein, a poet and pamphleteer. He was well-off and well-connected: his ...”