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“... Alexandra Tolstoy died in 1979. Except for Vanechka, who died in 1895 when he was seven, she was Tolstoy’s youngest child. She was also his close companion and secretary in the last years of his life. ‘The first and best period of my life was with my father. It lasted 26 years – perhaps only six or eight conscious years, and perhaps then not fully conscious, for it was not an easy period ...”

“... grave. The snow falls at Astopovo too, where Anne Edwards sets her prologue and shows us Countess Tolstoy outside the stationmaster’s hut, trying to catch a glimpse of her dying husband through the curtained windows. Astopovo is probably better documented than Mayerling, a secret trysting-place where afterwards everyone strove to hush up what had ...”

“... much fanned by Massie, and especially by his account of the Tsar and his family in Nicholas and Alexandra. Although his version of events obsessively overemphasises the significance of the Tsarevich’s haemophilia and of Rasputin, it leaves you half in love with the Romanovs, clear about the ways in which they brought about their own demise, yet sad that ...”

“... Tolstoys and, at 63, performed the can-can for the children. ‘Turgenev – the can-can. Sad,’ Tolstoy wrote in his diary. Most of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune ...”

“... one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The second part, at least, of Tolstoy’s celebrated dictum is borne out by Angus Wilson’s fiction, which deals largely in families, and this with a rich diversity through a long series of books. Sir Angus shuffles the cards brilliantly, but Unhappy Families remains the name of the ...”

“... scuttled away; Russia was in no position to take on Britain without their help; and the Tsarina Alexandra had her doubts, which was not so surprising given that, like the Kaiser, she was Queen Victoria’s grandchild – and in regular contact with her grandmother. The enthusiasm of the Russian public for the Boer cause knew no such ...”

“... ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by idiotic ...”

“... on a front row seat for his acceptance speech, then dozed off several times. His then wife Alexandra’s mother was a competitive pain. His son Dan, aged 12, kept ordering room service, running up the tab. The ‘family circus’, as Bellow called it, culminated in a luncheon in his honour hosted at the country house of his Swedish publisher. At the ...”