“... Three governesses, ‘mistresses of games and pleasures’, are employed to entertain the four young sons of the Austeur family. Although they have individual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), the governesses work as one. When they are at a loose end they like to ‘stroll through the garden together’ discussing their favourite t0pic of conversation ...”

“... It comes from encountering speech as an impenetrable wall – except it isn’t really, as Robert Frost knew. (He used the metaphor of people speaking through a wall, where you can discern the tone but not the words, in his ars poetica ‘The Sound of Sense’.)One could extract an entire book on Proust from Essays Two. When she agreed to translate Du ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”

“... of answers about the Yugoslav War. Democracy-promoting journalists like Michael Ignatieff and Robert Kaplan were pleased to learn from Djilas that the ethnic violence was the result of Tito’s failure to democratise the country when he had the chance. But they didn’t consider more disquieting problems presented by Djilas. The perceived selling-out of ...”

“... have something here.’ On receiving this verdict from the poet Josephine Miles in 1951, the young Ammons was taken aback: he’d expected ‘bad news’. Yet whatever the something was that Mr Ammons had, it remained hidden from view for some time. He brought out his first volume, Ommateum, with a vanity press in 1955, and, as he drily observed, ‘it ...”

“... for Europe. For a while they lived in Deyá, Mallorca, where Mathews came under the influence of Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess lurks behind some of the arcane mystic lore that turns up in the plot of his first novel, The Conversions (1962). A much greater influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced ...”

“... enemy but because it was the home of many of the world’s greatest physicists, the country where Robert Oppenheimer and others had gone to do graduate work, and where fission had been discovered. In December 1938, Otto Hahn, Germany’s leading radiation chemist, and his student Fritz Strassmann, profiting from the experimental work of Irène and Frédéric ...”

“... his blood was so mad, it felt like coagulating. It was equally clear that Crosby Stills Nash & Young were on about Nixon and the National Guard when they recorded ‘Ohio’ in 1970 (‘Four dead in Ohio’). There had always been vague protest songs, cut loose from proximate causes, such as ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Lady ...”

“... diplomat, who had also been a personal assistant to Hammarskjöld, ran into an old acquaintance, Robert Ahier, at the Paris Opéra. Ahier was a journalist and now held a senior position with United Press International. In the course of their conversation, Ahier told Kemoularia that he had a tenuous lead on the fate of the Albertina. He had come across ...”

“... to use direct inquiry as a way of assembling the evidence for his account of ‘events he was too young to have witnessed and of countries whose languages he did not understand’. Today field anthropologists and oral historians have shown that the results more than justify the dangers of this method. At the same time, as ...”

“... possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all means,’ Selznick wrote, ‘but let’s keep these gambles within the bounds of those that would be indulged in by rational businessmen.’ Over at MGM, Samuel Goldwyn had made his own calculations, telling ...”

“... family, and the nurse who, for her whole adult life, cared for the dying only to herself die young and alone from a horribly painful and degrading illness’? If biological death is final, as it seems to be, ‘if the good and the bad alike go down into oblivion, if there is nothing about reality itself that shores up this basic moral difference between ...”

“... splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... recalled a vision she and her husband had shared thirty years before in Rome when they were young and very rich: One night we went to sleep, greatly upset, and we saw ourselves, both of us, passing through a very narrow crack in the wall. We were gripped with panic by the cramped space, so that it seemed as if we were about to die. When we came through ...”