“... Russian writing failed to move with the times. I have seen Bulgakov described by his translator Roger Cockrell as a ‘Russian writer trapped in Soviet space’. Paustovsky seems not even to have been trapped. He is squarely of the 19th century, a Turgenevian or Chekhovian throwback.Chekhov, almost invariably, and not wrongly, is the point de repère for ...”

“... informative note, a detail of local colour which makes the opening action almost unintelligible. Young Elliott first makes friends with the Extra-Terrestrial, and revives him from incipient exhaustion, by laying a trail of ‘M&Ms’ from the forest to the backyard. ‘The great M&Ms have given me my vitality back,’ comments E.T., in interior ...”

“... and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein that the Berensons, ‘although neither young, or fresh, or cubistic’, were missed in Florence. Berenson had in fact just left for a stay in Paris, where, Samuels tells us, ‘the social kaleidoscope ... displayed its usual glitter,’ and ‘the days passed ... in a dizzying but pleasurable ...”

“... but he was raised in Kentucky, the child of Russian Jews. There is a photograph of the young Levy with his great-grandfather, a sacred scribe, a beautiful, bearded patriarch, not looking All-American. Kinsfolk might be Kentucky colonels (like finger-lickin’ Colonel Sanders) but society in Lexington, Kentucky did not wholeheartedly accept the ...”

“... and grey buildings, encased in pompous Doric pilasters, decorated in the mock-classicism which Roger Fry used to call pseudo-art. In Victorian museums, most of the ostentation was on the outside. As we all know, Charles Saatchi made his money in advertising. His museum is so discreet it is almost invisible, a giant hiding behind a row of tiny shops in a ...”

“... had taken a street car to Vincennes and walked round the fortifications. He gossiped. ‘Like all young men,’ he said, ‘I had a dose of the clap, but I never had much of a fling.’ He sang snatches of Italian opera, translating the words; hummed the minuet from Don Giovanni and, carried away by the rhythm, invited the naked model down from the table to ...”

“... when Corus announced it was mothballing the last furnace at Redcar, just east of Middlesbrough. Roger Cale, who worked in steel on Teesside for 40 years, drew diagrams for me of metal-making processes over a parmo, salad and chips. He explained the Bessemer Converter, the Open Hearth and the Electric Arc methods over four pages of my notebook, but the best ...”

“... Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary due – no gastronomic problems for her. However fast asleep she seemed to be, she had a preternatural seventh sense to catch the wine waiter passing by. That was just the start. Imagine the fare in New Delhi ...”

“... than mine? Are those who disbelieve in fairies dry, cold, paltry, disenchanted corrupters of the young? Few would say yes, because in practice it is generally recognised, despite the humbug of these last few days, that the narrowness or breadth of an intellectual system cannot be gauged without reference to what we independently believe to exist. The ...”

“... by observing the riotous behaviour of the commons in some disputes over common lands during his young days at Malmesbury. The book is not really about riots as much as it is about resistance to enclosures. His final sentence sums it up nicely: the villagers, he says, were ‘vainly attempting to restore a lost world which may never have existed’. The ...”

“... the best-known figures (and popularisers) of our day, such as Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg and Roger Penrose, not to mention all the proponents of superstring theory. But Horgan has also found some more fitting targets for his scorn. The expansion of science, the increasingly brutish struggle for survival that scientists must endure and the opportunities ...”

“... or at his business ability. His intellectual grasp must have been remarkable: otherwise, as a young man with little formal education he could not have been at ease in Bloomsbury with people like Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Rebecca West. Yet the book gives few insights into the character of his mind. His artistic ...”

“... is some affinity with another self-designed, but suburban, house of a very different painter, Roger Fry. The inclusion of this remote, largely unrecorded site is again testimony to Orbach’s determination and willingness to follow rutted, unmade, probably private roads through parched fields. (Betjeman said that a lodge, a drive and a ‘Keep Out’ sign ...”

“... he alternately calls ‘public opinion’ or politics ‘out-of-doors’. Like a number of other young historians, such as Michael Braddick and Phil Withington, he believes that even a divine-right absolute monarchy rested on the consent of the governed. Previous generations of scholars took that consent to be implicit and to reside in the institution of ...”

“... worthwhile books devoted to these figures, there should run such a noticeable vein of anxiety. In Roger Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Peter Sellers, for instance, proper celebration of comic genius goes hand in hand with character assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in ...”