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“... coming and a going,/A parting and often no – meeting again.’The Early Years does teach us that young Kafka often went ice-skating: sometimes on the frozen Vltava river, sometimes at a skating rink. Yet, Stach points out, ice-skating almost never appears in Kafka’s notes or fiction. Which is nice to notice. I’m not being facetious: Stach often does ...”

“... was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it. The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute. Implicit in it is the snubbing notion, radical at the time but by now canon doctrine, of the novel as a fine art and of the novelist as an intelligence ...”

“... be a substitute for empire, and that was sufficient; likewise his colleagues. As the journalist Hugo Young put it, ‘the deep, existential meaning, for Britain, of getting into “Europe” was not considered.’ No serious thought was given to the implications of accession. In his judgment, ‘ministers did not lie, but they avoided telling the full ...”

“... It is difficult to communicate to those too young to remember Pierre Mendès France (‘PMF’) the passionate enthusiasm his name generated. For a whole post-war French generation he was the de Gaulle of the Left: a man of total integrity, a beacon of intelligence and republican principle in the darkest hours. Yet he was prime minister for just 245 days ...”

“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

“... Sixties, when he was teaching at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies and the young directors were his students. He conveys a liking for put-upon but dogged and resilient human beings. Kundera himself has an attractive presence in the book: reminding us of the nature of fantasy by taking responsibility for it, in his role as novelist: but ...”

“... Madonna); an outsider who took the world of letters (or at any rate the NME) by storm, very young, very fast and ever so iconoclastic. And why? Not luck: enormous talent. She ‘made it look effortless, like a skater, and you can only make it look effortless if you have a lot of talent. My greatest gift, apart from my talent itself and my big green ...”

“... 1914), the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the crowd was ...”

“... needed God, ‘as a combination of errand boy and gynaecologist ... How this individual, no longer young and burdened by the personal bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, manages in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe is simply incredible.’ Trotsky’s view of God was as conventional as his view of women. All tyrannies ...”

“... Fernande had been the second wife of Yourcenar’s proud father, Michel de Crayencour: the young daughter subsequently enjoyed sisterly or motherly relationships with her father’s ‘mistresses or quasi-mistresses and later his third wife’. As a septuagenarian in 1974, Yourcenar noted that she was more than twice as old as Fernande had been in ...”

“... Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Jean Rhys was 12 at the time of the wedding in Castries, on the island of St Lucia. At the age of six a photograph had been taken of her: she looked very pretty then in a new white dress ...”

“... parties and factions across the globe, with hardline groups in New York and London and Stockholm. Hugo Chávez got his start in a Venezuelan platoon putting down a group of Hoxhaist rebels; an offshoot of the Hoxhaist party in Ecuador holds the provincial government of Esmeraldas. In Berlin, where I live, there are certain protests where the old Hoxhaists ...”

“... in the footsteps of Tony Harrison’s Continuous, Craig Raine’s Rich, Paul Muldoon’s Quoof and Hugo Williams’s Letters Home, all of which voyage round the paterfamilias: that tradition is much more pious and affectionate. The Williams offers the closest comparison: it too is about an overbearing writer-father and adopts a laconic, confessional voice. But ...”

“... could hardly be more out of season, and Brecht’s favourable comparison of him to Victor Hugo will quicken few pulses. Historians of the Kaiser’s Germany still refer to the character Diederich Hessling from Heinrich’s novel, Der Untertan, but even this wonderful monster of arrogance to those below, and subservience to those above, seems to strike ...”

“... of melodrama into the dénouement. On her travels, Porky, who is now quite affectless, meets a young Muslim who falls in love with her. They move into a flat in Earl’s Court, and, through indifference or self-destructiveness, she serves him a meal containing pork. Without the very careful setting – that wasteland between the A4 and the A30 – the ...”