“... seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal’s mind, informed ...”

“... when I was in the North Wing of St Pancras, I was sent to an experimental clinic for the young and depressed, but the clinic sent me back with a letter explaining that I was too disturbed and depressed for them to take me on. So my consultant put me on sleep therapy and every time I woke up, a nurse popped another barbiturate into my mouth, which I ...”

“... continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it was reissued by an American gay ...”

“... she protested, ‘would you have written to me?’ The answer was no. Maynard was his type: young, too thin, smart, a little bold and with next to no experience of the world. It was the photo that compelled him to start writing her a torrent of head-spinning letters but he refused to admit that her face had anything to do with it. Pulling his author ...”

“... and The Man without Qualities. Something in the story – about a gifted (yet insecure) young woman who moves to Manhattan in the early 1950s to become a theatre designer and ends up falling rapturously in love with a glamorous, outré older woman – must have once struck a chord: Sontag seemed to dote on it.And invariably she would probe for ...”

“... 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 ...”