“... 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 ...”

“... reviews of his production of Hamlet were so effusive that the acutely vain actor invited the young critic to meet him. At the end of 1878 Irving, by then actor-manager at the Lyceum, asked Stoker to come to London as front-of-house manager. It’s sometimes said that Irving, who exploited Stoker’s blind devotion to make outrageous demands on his time ...”

“... the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, who watches a man crying in front of Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross and worries that the ‘profound experience of art’ eludes him. She is unapologetic about her lapses in attention, and dares to find meaning in them. Gainza’s book sometimes recalls The Rings of Saturn, which ...”

“... from him. In 1739 she left England for Italy, hoping that her love for Francesco Algarotti, a young Italian, would result in a long and comfortable liaison. But her lover proved cold, and Lady Mary was left to enjoy Italy by herself. She never totally broke with her husband, and they maintained the fiction that she was travelling abroad for her ...”

“... Here is a typical passage from Philosophy and the Brain by the eminent neurophysiologist J.Z. Young: The pressure waves falling upon the ear from the sound of ‘Hullo’ are first transferred by the eardrum, then by the chain of three ossicles, next by fluid in the cochlear chamber and so into a travelling wave on the basilar membrane. From here they ...”

“... danger and discomfort are paramount. Borneo, written by the imprint’s publisher, Robert Pelton Young, describes itself as one of ‘a series of guides on remote regions for adventurers by adventurers’ and begins with a taste of what may lie in store for the user: I am squatting in a small clearing at night in the Borneo jungle … Sounds of tree ...”

“... at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls.’ What was unobvious in Bowen’s prose held out a promise, even as it frustrated my efforts at comprehension: it seemed to say that nothing was, after all, obvious – everything was interesting, because complicated. Needing this to be true, I ...”

“... and journeymen printers in 1730s Paris. Peeved by their stuck-up master and his mistress, these young men gleefully slaughtered their employers’ pampered cat, together with all the cats in the neighbourhood. It is a good story in its own right. But Darnton read it anthropologically – as a play of symbols, which the apprentices manipulated as effectively ...”

“... dinner plate), not Ottoline. The ‘very great doctor’ (page 139) should be glossed as based on Roger Vittoz, who treated Ottoline (and later T.S. Eliot) at Lausanne. The Introduction also gives us ‘the facts’ at the expense of the meaning. Its history of the novel’s evolution is so bald that an uninstructed reader could scarcely make head or tail of ...”

“... Ribbons and bunting gave the shallow tumulus the appearance of a place of pilgrimage. Fathers led young children by the hand, so that they would get an authentic taste of it – mortality, the survival of pre-posthumous fame. Hollywood has, since Valentino, lost its vampiric piety. Hereditary royalty is an unconvincing soap opera. The Krays have replaced all ...”

“... o’er the dead. So there were principles at stake. And the writers – most of them astoundingly young – had, well, a blast. Carr follows her subjects from the beginning of their association until the third and final Imagist anthology in 1917 (a retrospective anthology came out in 1930, giving Carr her dénouement). Much emotional drama is purloined from ...”

“... communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills ...”

“... only knew a few politicians’). What emerges from the Kissinger and Brzezinski memoirs, and from Roger Morris’s hostile account of Haig’s career, is not only the extent and the seriousness of the in-fighting that accompanies the process of nomination: the ensuing struggle for access to the President takes on a life, and a reality, all of its own. This ...”

“... and work: I was invited to speak about his time at Cambridge. The conference papers, edited by Roger Bowen, have been published, and Dr Bowen has also written an appreciative biography. Japanese studies being his subject, he is well qualified to weigh up the writings on modern Japan of Herbert Norman, a missionary’s son who grew up there. Very different ...”

“... Bentwoods answerable for the decay that surrounds them? And why does everyone Sophie meets, from a young couple at a cocktail party – the boy in ‘an army fatigue jacket’ and the girl in a white leather suit – to the old woman from whom she tries to buy an omelette pan, treat her with such awful condescension? These are not comfortable questions, and ...”