“... In his autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle certain coke bottles in an empty six-pack while he was out of the room for a couple of minutes ...”

“... is Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, about ballet and the human cost of perfection in it. (Michael Powell, who died recently at 84, was married to Scorsese’s long-time editor Thelma Schoon-maker, and introduces this book, which was originally his idea.) ‘I became fascinated by Anton Walbrook’s character, the impresario Lermontov, whose dedication ...”

“... to trust his instincts and veer dramatically off the beaten path established by the New Critics. Michael Hofmann has compared him to ‘a sort of one-off comet that approached that cosy solar system, lit it up for a while, and then exited’.In the event, the zany deformations, the insults, the whimsy, the hysteria, the caustic comments on public events ...”

“... dead, Your wife, your child? Ros Schwartz is quoting here from a selection of Sachs in English by Michael Hamburger and others, whereas when it comes to rendering from Vietnamese, she offers the original transliterated, and then, working closely with Gansel, translates from her French versions, thereby forging a powerful echo chamber (even two steps removed ...”

“... He was, nevertheless, a wonderful translator when put together with the right originals, as Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun discovered when they commissioned from him versions of three episodes from the Metamorphoses for their compilation After Ovid, published in 1994. One might initially have thought that Ovid’s wit and sophistication would ...”

“... The only reason​ Werner Herzog hasn’t yet made a film about the Ancient Mariner may be that, having already inadvertently incorporated so many elements of the poem into his own work, he has become him. Herzog certainly shares Coleridge’s interest in the physical and spiritual toll taken by epic voyages into uncharted waters. There are several rafts as well as a phantom schooner stuck up a tree in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), the film about a berserk conquistador which established him as a leading figure in German New Wave cinema; and a steamboat hauled over the isthmus separating two tributaries of the Amazon, and then flushed down a flight of rapids, in Fitzcarraldo (1982), the film about a 19th-century rubber baron and opera fanatic which sealed his international reputation ...”

“... in 1845, the result of a private subscription set up by Sir James Clark (the Queen’s physician), Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort. Its first director, recruited from Germany, was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Perkin became a student there in 1853. Hofmann was already investigating ...”

“... the notion that some themes are ‘higher’ than others. There is a linguistic context too: thus Michael Hofmann, introducing his translation of Metamorphosis, quotes Klaus Wagenbach to the effect that ‘the characteristic purity of Kafka, the sober construction of his sentences and the paucity of his vocabulary are not understandable without his ...”

“... fatherland, the only one I have ever had’. ‘His birthplace had been ceded to Poland,’ writes Michael Hofmann, ‘his country – the supranational Dual Monarchy comprising 17 nationalities – was a figment of history, and he lived off his wits, out of a couple of suitcases.’ My uncle lorded it over the Indians until they quit the empire, yet he ...”

“... characteristically abrupt: ‘When I was 15, I got hepatitis.’ That was in 1958. The narrator is Michael Berg, the son of a professor of philosophy. One day on his way home from school he throws up and nearly faints. A woman takes him into the courtyard of her apartment block, sluices him down at the pump, then sluices down the pavement. He is crying, so she ...”

“... campaigners generating the stories. Early in his survey of ‘the new science of psychedelics’, Michael Pollan talks to Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), pioneers of therapeutic research into MDMA, LSD and ayahuasca, who is candid about his choice of the medical paradigm as ‘a means to a more ambitious and ...”

“... the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations (by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text, they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect) intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to find out what is happening. I ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... not deterred the blurb-writers or big-name eulogists. Among the extreme claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the ...”

“... in New York; Jasper Johns was still an outlier. The old mad master of abstract expressionism, Hans Hofmann, had two successive shows at Sam Kootz’s gallery in 1958 and 1959, first of recent work in high colour, and second of paintings drawn from his long career, the retrospective (selected by Clement Greenberg) opening in the same month as Eight American ...”