“... which believes that the minor vices, such as drunkenness and dirt, ordinarily cohabit with the major virtues.’ The book is especially good in its treatment of the caesura in Dostoevsky’s life, the years 1863-5, which preceded marriage to Anna Grigorevna and the writing of Crime and Punishment. On the other hand, the book is weak on Dostoevsky the ...”

“... ridge, once occupied, river valley to densely forested upper slopes, by Indian tribes, was a major statement of intent from Snyder. ‘We were cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his ...”

“... from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... spray-canned: the one I see regularly denounces 200 YEARS OF WHITE LIES.That line represents a major theme in the contra-centennial opposition. Most Aboriginal leaders are insisting on peaceful and dignified protest; some, peacefully or not, want to tip the re-enacted First Fleet back into the sea. A march (‘for hope, freedom and justice’) is under ...”

“... but once committed to the idea, he was a loyal and stubborn ally. Ashworth introduced Goossens to John Joseph Cahill, who was soon to become Labour Premier of New South Wales. A backroom politician of Irish immigrant stock who dreamed of bringing art to the people, Cahill gave an Australian down-to-earthness to the high-toned support for the scheme, and many ...”

“... names of 15 athletes from track and field, seven from the National Football League and five from major league baseball, including Barry Bonds. The game was up, or so it seemed. It is not hard to understand the reasoning of the track athletes who went to Conte for help, despite all the risks of associating with such a blabbermouth. They were in it for the ...”

“... and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence, has just appeared in ...”

“... Craig and Plath by Gwyneth Paltrow. From the early 1970s more or less until his death Hughes was a major hate figure for those he and his sister, Olwyn, derisively called ‘women’s libbers’, who vilified him as the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included ...”

“... found it either natural or politically expedient to enthuse about Europe. I grew tired of hearing Major and then Blair insisting that we were ‘at the heart of Europe’ when we hadn’t joined the euro or signed up to the Schengen Agreement. Politicians never tried to sell Europe to the British people as anything other than an advantageous commercial joint ...”

“... to Italy. Here he first met Edith Oliver, a spinster in her fifties, whose journals are one of the major sources for the life. Her first impression (‘a delightful keen boy who loves talking’) was not to change. He was equally pleased. After his first visit to her house, in the grounds of Wilton, he wrote of ‘darling Edith whom I adore’. She had never ...”

“... photographer who became an icy director. Sometimes this psychology is bluntly moralised, as when John Baxter, another biographer (HarperCollins, 1997), says that Kubrick’s making Eyes Wide Shut, ‘a film about self-involved people and their fantasies’, has ‘a sour inevitability’. And sometimes it is aestheticised, as when LoBrutto calls Kubrick ‘a ...”

“... Amadeus.) Binyon’s biography has the populousness of Tolstoy. An astonishing number of major and minor characters are introduced – and thickly introduced, with a paragraph or two of data – and kept in patient sight over hundreds of pages. Even very minor figures, who appear only once, get a packed footnote. A French chef called Tardif, for ...”

“... paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well as European) Jews, and during the Second World War had inhibited efforts to ...”

“... constituent pieces (well over a thousand of them) are now mounted separately. There are two other major miscellanies, both in England. One is the collection of drawings and manuscripts in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This is also an inheritance from Pompeo Leoni: indeed, some of the smaller fragments at Windsor were demonstrably snipped by Leoni out ...”