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“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... duality, or ambivalence, of Freud’s has not always been noticed. For example, whereas Thomas Mann saw in Freud’s ‘unmasking of happening as really doing...the innermost core of psychoanalytic theory’, T.W. Mitchell, one of Freud’s earliest British supporters, saw him as ‘dominated by the prevailing urge to find mechanistic explanations for ...”

“... Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s population, as many as died in two world wars, almost ten times as many as have died in a decade of Aids. The virus, transmitted by airborne mucus and saliva, spread via coughs and sneezes ...”

“... and more regular treatments – of L’Etranger by Patrick McCarthy, and of The Tale of Genji by Richard Bowring – with a great many more to come. So far, Shaw is absent from a list which includes Dickens, Homer, Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Woolf, Constant, Balzac, Mann and Tolstoy: so it is as well that he is being taken ...”

“... Rathenau, Alexander Zaharov and Marianne Mitford, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann, the philosopher Georg Simmel and the philosophical essayist Rudolf Kassner, as well as Gide and Valéry (both of whom he translated into German), Claudel, Cocteau and George Bernard Shaw. Of his contacts with the public figures of his age Leppmann ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a memory ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...”

“... in Creativity’, sounds stern, but the case histories it describes are those of Kandinsky, Thomas Mann and Giacometti. If those are the angry actors, where’s the harm in joining their gang? As the article explains, ‘whether attempts at channelling aggression are successful or not depends largely on the ability of the ego to tolerate aggression.’ The ...”

“... just under the surface: Catherine Deneuve’s character appears to be the mistress of both Simon (Richard Crenna), the gangster behind the raid, and Edouard Coleman (Delon), the policeman pursuing him; Coleman exchanges lengthy, longing glances with one of his informers, a transvestite prostitute who’s clearly in love with him, only to inflict an even more ...”

“... medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the world of ...”