“... self-preoccupied gesturing and accesses of information-sharing: As in the spring of 1961 Elly and Hugo Claus and I Smoked as we watched The people of the town of Skopje Stroll back and forth across their fountained square, Safe in their murmur on our balcony, One dusk, not long before an earthquake tipped Themselves and their society aside. It’s a mode ...”

“... to enjoy a country girl called Sasha. It was a huge amount of information for an inexperienced young woman to absorb in a very short time with a crucial deadline pending. ‘I don’t think,’ Sonya wrote years later, ‘I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries … I can still remember … the horror of that first appalling experience of ...”

“... and despair registered in paintings such as Departure and Death (1938), Beckmann appeared to the young Kentridge as ‘a beacon for endangered souls’. Kentridge was born into a Jewish family of anti-apartheid lawyers; his mother was a committed activist, while his father defended Nelson Mandela in his treason trial in 1956-61 and represented Steve Biko’s ...”

“... body; overwhelming’. He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s interest in the young Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers, and in the novella Disorder and Early Sorrow, written when Elisabeth was seven, the relationship between the bookish father and his young daughter, clearly based on Mann’s relationship ...”

“... who have troubled to take me seriously,’ he writes in The Summing Up (1938), ‘and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me. I do not resent it. I look upon it as very natural.’ In the face of attacks from the likes of Edmund Wilson (who called him ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... radio made the point that North Carolina was itself no stranger to hurricanes – Hazel (1954), Hugo (1989), Fran (1996), Floyd (1999). It’s no stranger to racism either. The Neuse River, the Roanoke River and the Yadkin River, named, like so much in the state, by the native Indian population that was cleared to make way for the twinkling lights and ...”

“... father, Jacob, was a mobile self-fashioning son of the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment. As a young man he entered into partnership with his maternal grandfather, Siskind, plying their trade in wool, linen, honey, tallow, to and fro between backward Galicia and Moravia, that much closer to Vienna with its more inquisitive policies of assimilation. The two ...”

“... to think that L’Éducation sentimentale was about a hundred pages too long, and that all those young men – different exemplars of Frédéric Moreau’s generation, which is destined to fail – were a bit sketchy and indistinguishable. But I reread it this year and found it just the right length, with the lesser characters as developed as they need to ...”

“... to ethics, logic and psychology lectures at the university, and once a week she met up with the ‘young handsome’ John Money, ‘glistening with newly applied Freud’, and played up to her diagnosis to keep his attention, her act bolstered by the case histories of schizophrenics she read in the public library (‘It’s masturbation,’ she told ...”

“... Selden to write the treatise Mare Clausum defending the doctrine of territorial waters against Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (Pepys bought a copy of Mare Clausum in St Paul’s Churchyard, but didn’t think much of it), as well as to justify Charles’s levying of a further tranche of ship money. Like Kevin Sharpe in The Personal Rule of Charles I, Rodger ...”

“... 2002 it had plummeted to $8000. The population had quadrupled since 1970: a quarter of a million young men enter the inhospitable labour market each year. Actual conditions cannot be determined with any precision; officially, unemployment is around 10 per cent, but it may be as much as three or four times that among the ...”

“... of the Master’s study. Speaking by telephone from London, Roussel urged his agent to fob off the young poet with the comment that ‘Il ne se classe lui-même dans aucune école.’ Until almost the end of his life Roussel lived in a world that no other artist was either wealthy or neurotic enough to experience. ‘No author has been, or can ever be greater ...”

“... Guevara was more interested in medicine than in Peronist, or indeed continental, politics. As a young man, he apparently advised the maids in his parents’ house to vote for Perón on the grounds that his policies favoured their ‘social class’ – a formulation which suggests that Perón had little to offer the comfortably-off Guevara family. (Very ...”

“... His mother edited Proclus and Pythagoras. When his father died after a long illness in 1949, the young Timpanaro brought together a posthumous collection of his essays on the history of science. The physical resemblance between the two men must have been striking. In the darkened hall of the family flat in Florence in the 1980s, there hung a gaunt, arresting ...”