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“... which effectively inaugurates modern drama in Germany. He then writes The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a melancholy novel in letters, and becomes an immensely influential European figure, a provoker of fashions in dress and suicide, a sort of Byron before Byron. He is 25. Troubled by this success in print – Götz was published to great ...”

“... helped him become fluent in English and familiar with the Bible. Afterwards, like many ambitious young men, he joined the Brahmo Samaj movement. Its leaders followed the example of the revered Ram Mohun Roy in seeking to free the Brahmin elite from the trammels of caste observance. They claimed to have found in the Vedas an ancient monotheism that fused the ...”

“... Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum ...”

“... time than in a desire to say anything about the war. The book tells the story of Edward Haggard, a young hospital doctor, training to be a surgeon, who falls in love with the wife of the hospital’s senior pathologist. There are many excellent characters (Cushing, for example, the flinty senior surgeon who is given to whistling arias from the great operas ...”

“... them: ‘they destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had ...”

“... shared a building with National Lampoon. Kincaid struck up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... that much of his output probably was as vulgar as his inter-war critics had claimed. Percy Young believed that the man and his music were inseparable, and presented Elgar as a ‘two-worldly character’, torn between the private poet of Worcestershire (who wrote great music), and the public poseur of London (who did not). In what remains the best and ...”

“... of his novel, leading us back from impending departure into the events of the previous year. Michael is an unprepossessing family man. He takes what he likes and abuses the rest, which is sometimes his wife. When her pregnancy entered its advanced stages, she became useless, no longer pleasurable, and he left her for the consolations of his ...”

“... his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint. (Futility is the only novel in ...”

“... wretched, delightful; and always compelling, always surprising. Both as a child and later as a young man, Achak comes forcefully across as a person of considerable charm, intelligence, wit and resilience; he only very rarely sounds a little too like Dave Eggers. Two stories unfold simultaneously in What Is the What. It begins, vividly and against ...”

“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”