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“... translations of both works: of the first by Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1958, of the second by John Sturrock in 1988. The English titles rather elegantly contradict one another. Sturrock’s is literal and exact: Against Sainte-Beuve. Townsend Warner’s is more allusive and less quarrelsome: By Way of Sainte-Beuve. Sturrock calls her title ...”

“... fans. He was, Mann said, ‘charged with life and stormily progressive’, an innovator, with one foot already ‘on atonal terrain’, a ‘cultural Bolshevik’ (Kulturbolschewist) ‘man of the Volk who all his life fervently rejected power, money, violence and war’ and intended his festival for ‘a classless society, whatever the age made of it’. In ...”

“... the seedlings. Delivery was complicated owing to ‘the bulk [that] arises from the bellows’, as John Tyndall, the Institution’s professor of natural philosophy, explained.In such peaceful pursuits, surrounded by his family and struggling, though less than in some years, with the mysterious illnesses that had dogged him for decades, Darwin conformed to the ...”

“... to ‘the little bastard’, in Starkey’s well-informed imagination, red-eyed and stamping her foot. Starkey knows that when Elizabeth told her stepmother Catherine Parr (in the first of her letters to have survived, and written in Italian), that she had not ‘dared’ to write to her father, this was significant of nothing more than the protocol which ...”

“... references to patterns of doubling and mirrors in this and other Hitchcock movies. And he puts his foot down firmly here and there about some pretty trainspotting points. No, Hitchcock did not mistreat Leigh by insisting on cold water for the shower (though she and the others had already explained this and other things in a very full and rather good ...”

“... at No. 7 Mall Studios, a row of artists’ living and working spaces with skylights and twenty-foot-high windows. Herbert Read lived at No. 3, and around the corner on Parkhill Road were Henry and Irina Moore, close enough for Moore to continue the ‘sibling-like rivalry’ with Hepworth which had begun during their student days in Leeds. The set gathered ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... the next ten slams, with Federer taking four (the tenth was won by Juan Martín del Potro, a six-foot-five Argentinian with a spectacularly powerful forehand whose career was eventually curtailed by wrist and knee injuries – another reason it’s hard to be confident about a player’s long-term prospects). The only problem with the Federer-Nadal ...”

“... and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing ...”

“... There are several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though ...”

“... gossip. (I once passed on a piece of gossip which caused Karl to look up from his desk and say: ‘John, your ear is so close to the ground, it’s coming out in Australia.’ I didn’t mind the zinger, but thought Mary-Kay and Susannah had no need to laugh quite as much as they did.) He was particularly interested in the Spanner trial, in which a group of ...”

“... the whodunnit in which the puzzle apparently remains unsolved. Did O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, murder his wife? Or not? And what happens to Wade himself? O’Brien does not tell you – at least not directly. The conundrum has so confounded most American reviewers that, after a few lines detailing the primary components of the central plot ...”

“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... bonnet – except the nape of a neck, the exposed back of one hand, and a tentative, slipper-clad foot. Crude they may be, yet without these sisterly gleanings we would know next to nothing of Austen’s face or figure or how she held herself in space: dead at 42 in 1817, she is part of that last, infinitely poignant, generation of human beings who lived and ...”

“... of this. ‘I want to see the agony,’ he said. Later, Rupert managed to drive over Newell’s foot just as Newell was telling him once more that he wasn’t seeing the pain: ‘“Ahhhh!” he bellowed right in my ear, like a bear in a trap. I quickly reversed and ran it over again.’ But it all ended happily: ‘For all the problems during shooting ...”