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“... In 1972 a 26-year-old American schizophrenic, Anthony Baekeland, killed his mother Barbara with a kitchen knife. They had been sleeping together. It was her idea: she thought it would cure his homosexuality. An earlier cure by means of a French girl had not been completely successful; Tony’s father, Brooks Baekeland, had gone off with the girl he married after Barbara’s death ...”

“... In the Berlin restaurant Baron Kuno von Pregnitz, ignoring Mr Norris, suddenly asked the young Englishman: ‘And, excuse me, how are the Horse Guards?’ ‘Still sitting there.’ ‘Yes? I am glad to hear this. Ho! Ho! Ho! ... Excuse me, I can remember them very well.’ They had in fact been sitting there for longer perhaps than Christopher Isherwood knew ...”

“... Maria Callas died almost exactly three years ago. Two months later Arianna Stassinopoulos was commissioned to write her biography. She was half-way through when she made the discovery that there were two Callases: La Callas, the diva of the legend, and Maria, the living suffering woman ‘beyond’. ‘And just as she was in danger of disappearing into a shimmer of ordinariness – of insecurities, of snobbery, of fears, of common humanity – I rediscovered her without illusions in all her real rather than her public greatness … It is this passion for life, for her art and for something unknown beyond both, that was compelling her and driving her forever on ...”

“... Bloomsbury on the left, Neo-Pagans on the right, these columns represent, more or less, Paul Delany’s relative definition of the two Edwardian intellectual groups. The first two pairs of adjectives are quoted from his Introduction. Of course, Bloomsbury and the Neo-Pagans had much in common: an educated upper middle-class background; Cambridge – almost all the men went there, and some of the women; at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury men mostly belonged to the Apostles, and so did Rupert Brooke and Ferenc Bekassy, a fringe Neo-Pagan; nervous breakdowns were common in both groups and treated by the same doctors with the same regime – called ‘stuffing’ – in the sense of fattening up; members of both sets recognised one another in the audience at the opera and Diaghilev’s London seasons ...”

“... A man in a Thurber cartoon asks a woman: ‘But Myra, what do you want to be enigmatic for?’ Or words to that effect. The question kept coming into my head as I read Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel, which is set on the Titanic during the four days before she sank, and narrated in the first person by a survivor whose first and only name is Morgan. The title, Every Man for Himself, suggests that human selfishness is going to be the theme ...”

“... In his afterword, Len Rix, the translator of this Hungarian novel, says that its narrative ‘coincides with rising Fascism at home and abroad, and probes the national obsession with suicide’. It was first published in 1937 in Budapest, and its author died in a Nazi labour camp six years later at the age of 43. He was, Rix explains, a cradle Catholic, but ‘his technically Jewish extraction and his lifelong stance against Fascism attracted mounting official persecution ...”

“... This biography is sad and bad. Bad like a bad pre-war Hollywood movie – monumentally, heroically implausible. But its badness is also its greatest asset: the style and attitude transport one to the time and place where most of the action is set. Everything that happens is drama, every conversation is script. Antoni Gronowicz, now dead, claims that he met Garbo in Paderewski’s house on Lake Geneva in 1938 when she was 35 and he was 22 ...”

“... It’s ages since I got over being a sexual psychopath,’ Wedekind wrote, ‘and yet, I shall never forget it: those were happy days.’ His Diary of an Erotic Life is a record of those happy days between 1887, when he was 23, and 1894. A few pages of short entries cover the period 1908 to 1918. That was the year he died, after several botched operations on his appendix ...”

“... Pyramids Street runs double track from the centre of Cairo to the western suburb of Ghiza. Seafood restaurants and night-clubs with belly-dancing line the final few kilometres. The last building is the Mena House, a soaring, turreted Oriental San Simeon set in luscious grounds. Now a hotel, it was once a royal hunting-lodge. Across the road lies an enclosure where camels and Arab steeds wait to take tourists up the last steep bend to the Pyramids ...”

“... This book is beautifully designed and printed, and very well translated by Mary Whittall. The English sometimes sounds a bit gnarled, but so does Kokoschka’s idiosyncratic German: not because Czech was his first language, though; his father was a German-speaking Czech from Prague, his mother Austrian; he was born in Lower Austria in 1886, grew up in a suburb of Vienna, and trained at the famous School of Arts and Crafts there ...”

“... Antonia White died eight years ago aged 81. In the past three years, two biographies or memoirs of her have been published, each by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath ...”

“... This might have been the autobiography of the present Archbishop of Paris. It caused some sensation when it first appeared in French in 1978. The author is an Israeli historian and political scientist who teaches at the University of Tel Aviv and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He specialises in the history of the Third Reich and has also written about psycho-history and collaborated with an Arab, Mahmoud Hussein, in a Dialogue about Arabs and Israelis ...”

“... Both authors of The British Aristocracy have been connected with Burke’s Peerage. One doesn’t expect genealogists to be particularly indulgent: their job, after all, is to separate the sheep from the goats. But these two are soft-hearted and broadminded to a fault, or so social historians, as well as some of their subjects, might think. They draw the demarcation-line between the aristocracy and the rest to take in almost the whole middle class except ‘the rag trade, showbiz and property dealing ...”

“... Imagine a mixture of Maurice Chevalier (Gallic charm), Max Miller (the Cheeky Chappie), and Don Juan, with a boastful list of sexual conquests on which contesse, baronesse, marchesine, principesse line up with famous literary and theatrical ladies as well as top professionals in another field. The man is also a racing driver, yachtsman, avant-garde theatre and film producer, poet, translator of Elizabethan verse and Christopher Fry, and the inventor of the windscreen-wiper, starlight electric bulbs and château bottling, not to speak of his being a Rothschild ...”

“... Last year in Bonn in the brand-new Museum of Modern History (Haus der Geschichte) I watched a video about concentration camps. A row of female guards captured by the Allies stood in line, middle-aged and grim. Then a younger one spoke straight to camera. She was blonde and dishevelled; she said her name, her age – 24 – and that she had been at Belsen two months ...”