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“... Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never secret, being set out in Ransome’s own articles for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian (his early stuff was often reprinted in the New York ...”

“... often been observed, is its implementation through industrial technology – the railways, the gas chambers, and the crematoria – controlled by an elaborate bureaucracy. It is the bureaucracy of genocide that is Weil’s real subject. In Life with a Star, he focuses almost exclusively on the experience of progressive dehumanisation of the victim of the ...”

“... the war. We never learn his real name. It gradually emerges that he spent time in Gestapo torture chambers and then in a concentration camp. He is not a Jew, though he allows everyone to assume that he is, but was in some undisclosed opposition group. Nearly 12 years on the run have left him wary, distrustful, plagued by horrific dreams and flashbacks. Once ...”

“... Companions to Literature, one of them edited by Margaret Drabble, give her 13 lines between them. Chambers Biographical Dictionary snortingly dismisses the Glyn output as ‘nonsensical, high-falutin, faulty in construction and ungrammatical’, qualities which were never a bar to popular acclaim. Canadian-born, Jersey-reared, self-educated in the family ...”

“... all muddled together. Hence Keats’s strenuous and touchingly impressive attempts to distinguish chambers of maiden thought in vales of soul-making, to write grave allegories about art and the human condition, to write finally and bitterly that he had no faith whatever in poetry – ‘I only wonder that people read so much of it.’ The reference must be to ...”

“... family: small and fair-haired, he ‘passed for Aryan’ while his mother was taken to the gas-chambers and his father deported to a series of concentration camps. As the hunt for Jews in Krakow grew more intense, Roman was passed on to the Buchala family, poor peasants in a remote village who had never seen a motor-car and could not imagine an electric ...”

“... wife, in a photograph Begley reproduces twice in his book because he finds it so moving, and which Roland Barthes described as ‘one of the loveliest photographs in the world’. Nadar also took a photograph of her 35 years earlier, shortly after they were married, in which she sits back, arms folded protectively, eyes fixed on the camera, sceptical and ...”

“... literary texts, as we shall see. Not only does Williams avert her eyes from catacombs and burial chambers, but like Mumford she views the world below the surface as a place of fossils and minerals rather than of organic life. We are shown an Aladdin’s cave of technological resources, but not the Wonderland of strange creatures found down a rabbit-hole ...”

“... to flatten out the contours of national origin and class, but not on closer inspection. The writer Roland Dorgelès described how in Cahors, a town ‘choked with the volume of people within its walls’, ‘the more privileged were sleeping in their cars’ while most huddled in doorways or curled up on pavements. Pierre Mendès-France, who’d been elected ...”

“... as a form of anaesthesia before the cut. The operation affected the voice. ‘Their resonating chambers,’ Feldman continues, ‘were thus larger than normal in proportion to the vocal emission equipment (the larynx), so much so that we can suppose that with the right training some castrato voices could deliver a sound of greater punch and more powerful ...”

“... and depths, and sudden turns and visions of half-open doors into what Quarles calls “mollitious chambers” – and above all, landing-places – they are my heart’s delight – I would come upon you unaware on a landing-place in my next dream!’All Browning’s best moments are ‘landing-places’ in a dream, stairs and passages and galleries on the ...”