“... different kinds of story. Einstein’s achievement is typically portrayed as the epic tale of one man’s obsession. The creation of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, required an ensemble that included Niels Bohr, who dressed like a banker and mumbled like an oracle; Werner Heisenberg, a gregarious Bavarian who was given to banging out Beethoven piano ...”

“... have remained too white for the blacks. This is not a middle ground or a place of poise: it is no man’s land, and it is a place that black women writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou seem to have understood better than anyone. They were at Baldwin’s funeral in New York when the white world had forgotten him and black militants were only just ...”

“... heavy lifting was often done by the same people. Julius Caesar described himself as a ‘military man’, but he sidelined as a historian, grammarian, playwright, poet and astronomer. The memoirs of his military campaigns formed part of a larger body of work that included De Analogia (‘the most careful and precise ...”

“... and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as ...”

“... fraternity, about the masses, but no – he was an aristocrat: he was deeply an aristocrat, a man of the élite.’ ‘I think probably from his childhood, which he hated, he had to forge a sort of mask. He needed that.’ Contradictory verdicts on André Malraux, from witnesses I questioned about him in Paris when making a documentary for BBC Radio ...”

“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...”

“... Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis’, Freud’s case history of the Rat Man (real name: Ernst Lanzer), there is an account of Lanzer’s attempts to repay a debt, or rather his attempt to describe his attempts to do so. While a reserve officer on military exercises, he loses his pince-nez and sends a telegram to his optician in ...”

“... period of Goethe’s life, is not one age but several. ‘To think otherwise is to diminish the man and to misrepresent the time – his time, and ours.’ This must be true in the long run, and presumably will be seen to be true in Boyle’s completed work. But his first volume, and even the second, show us a Goethe rather more associated with his age than ...”

“... and skirts that could be worn in different combinations); trousers; and, the great couturier Paul Poiret’s stroke of genius, a dress that a woman could put on without assistance. This discrepancy between women’s experience and men’s may be one reason why dress has come to be seen as a predominantly female subject, or at least one that is expressed ...”

“... or patted my cheek like a parish priest’. But his hair still defined his character. Poil de carotte (‘Carrot Top’), his autobiographical novel of 1894 about the unhappy experiences of a redheaded child, was his most lasting literary success. Poil de carotte was Renard and Renard was Poil ...”

“... Poet’; the deranger of the senses, or ‘Hallucinogenic Poet’; and, as the lover of Paul Verlaine, the ‘Gay Poet’. Mason means myths, I think, in the sense of true stories which become more than the sum of their parts. The problem with them all, he believes, is that they ‘put too plain a face on the poems’, which are ‘vessels of ...”

“... Sir Paul Marshall​ ’s emergence as a right-wing media tycoon has been rapid. A decade ago he was a Lib Dem donor; now he owns the house journal of the Conservative Party. Immediately after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence ...”

“... battle. Dr Johnson, praising the quality of courage, told Boswell: ‘We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch and knocks you down behind your back.’ Barabbas as a footpad was contemptible, but Barabbas armed and riding a fine horse was up for admiration. Similar standards did not exist ...”

“... includes a visit to the headquarters of the Free French in London (complete with a glimpse of De Gaulle), and seems at first to be a sequence of illustrations of the life of the movement. A man is arrested, plans an escape, gets taken to Paris for interrogation before he can put his plan into effect. In Paris he kills a ...”

“... abolitionists were inspired by a now quaint concern with salvation. The language used by Nicolas de Condorcet in his Reflections on the Slavery of Negroes (1781) is essentially the same as that of modern anti-racism: ‘Although I am not of the same colour as you,’ he imagined himself addressing enslaved Africans, ‘I have always regarded you as my ...”