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“... he ate no less than a thousand meals with journalists, mostly at sober, modest places like L’Ecu de France, where it is hard to eat for two (and partake of the standard rieslings) for less than £100. A passage about Eric Varley, the former Labour Secretary of State for Industry, echoes the contrast in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden ...”

“... obsession. For thirty years he has been ferreting out every copy of Nicholas Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium to which library catalogues, booksellers’ lists, auction records, informed tips and plain luck led him. The exceptional importance of Copernicus’s work in the history of science was only indirectly the cause of this ...”

“... to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and ...”

“... When​ we happen across a gay man in the 19th-century novel, we do just that. We are made suddenly aware of him, standing in sharp relief against the busy background, apparently having very little to do with it. Usually, we see him just for a moment. Often we do not trust ourselves: we do a double-take. Occasionally, there is a flash of recognition ...”

“... Yeats​ was a great admirer of Paul Valéry’s poem ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (‘The Graveyard by the Sea’), but only up to a point – the point where he thought that the poem’s main injunction was not about lingering among the tombs and talking to the dead, but about getting on with life, or trying to. ‘After certain poignant stanzas,’ Yeats wrote, ‘and just when I am deeply moved, he chills me ...”

“... curious milieu of the prewar and wartime Austrian emigration to Britain. Not the least merit of Paul Broda’s book is that it throws light on this neglected but not insignificant aspect of Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the ...”

“... whose best works were inspired by his membership of the experimental group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). It was to OuLiPo that he owed his interest in palindromes, anagrams, crosswords, acrostics and mathematical algorithms as sources of literary structures. The most noted Oulipian feature of his work is his exploitation of the ...”

“... night’ (I Thessalonians 5.2). In 19th-century France, it came in the shape of the abbé Jacques-Paul Migne. Between 1840 and 1870, with the help of several hundred poorly-paid workers and the latest in steam-powered printing, Migne undid the effects of the French Revolution, reversed the Reformation, created ‘the two most beautiful historical monuments to ...”

“... Ministers; his grandfather, Count Nicholas, described by Lord Salisbury as ‘an amusing, joking man without regard for the truth’, negotiated the treaty which concluded the Russo-Turkish War and, as Alexander III’s Minister of the Interior, re-organised the secret police and introduced the legislation which kept the autocracy safe in their hands for the ...”

“... Un Rat,​ las de la vie des villes, et des cours; (car il avait joué son rôle aux palais des rois et aux salons des grand seigneurs) un rat, que l’expérience avait rendu sage, enfin, un rat qui de courtisan était devenu philosophe, s’était retiré à sa maison de campagne (un trou dans le tronc d’un grand ormeau) où il vivait en ermite et dévouait tout son temps et tous ses soins à l’éducation de son fils unique ...”

“... Hey, everybody,​ how about it, huh?’ Paul Ryan said, coming onto a stage decorated with hay bales and pumpkins in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of 9 October. ‘Man, good day! Good to see you, what a beautiful day, huh? Welcome to Fall Fest, you guys! Welcome to Fall Fest! Look, let me just start off by saying, there is a bit of an elephant in the room ...”

“... Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for the Resistance under cover of his work in the textile trade. After crossing into Spain through the Pyrenees, he had presented himself at the ...”

“... The man​  in the title of Julian Barnes’s eighth work of non-fiction is the Parisian physician Samuel Pozzi. The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject ...”

“... comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ...”

“... Born in 1838, Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam came of an illustrious Breton line, latterly more distinguished for its poverty and eccentricity. His grandfather, who fought against the Revolution but failed to thrive under the Restoration, wrote to the Minister of Justice in 1815 that, had his name not been so long already, he would have asked the reigning monarch, Louis XVIII, ‘to add to it that of “poor devil”, and that is a name I really deserve ...”