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“... 1999, we read sentences like these: ‘In this city the old women dress like adolescents and the young women like old women, because this way they get each other’s jobs’; ‘I was very happy in his arms, especially when I thought of all the films we would see together.’ The thing would be to distinguish this posture, if we can, from simple denial of ...”

“... of a priest in Riazan, a provincial city almost two hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, the young Ivan Petrovich seemed destined for the cloth. The only sure path for advancement for Ivan and his brothers was to enrol at the Riazan theological school, and then to attend the local theological seminary. A truly gifted student might later go to the ...”

“... valley; eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of bottles on the pre-dawn commuter train. A young medical student is ordered to make notes on a local painter and madman, a fellow by the name of Strauch. Strauch has the honour of being the first precipitation in fiction of the typical Bernhard bravado and nihilism and savagery. With his intellect and ...”

“... you will go under if you don’t fight back Surely you must see that?It is perhaps worth having Michael Hamburger’s version here, just to hear a slightly different lilt: And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for ...”

“... isolation and emptiness, a space where new and old selves can be found and lost. Alex Darken is a young poet whose marriage has broken up, and who has borrowed a cottage in Norfolk in which to lick his wounds. He meets a burnt-out older poet and his young American mistress, and the foreseeable passions and conflicts ...”

“... has dinner with a couple from another story (about the husband discovering the corpse of a young woman), and in yet another story he treats a child who has been hit by a car. The child’s parents are the neighbours of an aging jazz singer and her difficult, cello-playing daughter. Both families have their pool cleaned by a character in another story ...”

“... his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did live, worked hard and happily, and got engaged. Then he died. His fiancée visited the hospital to thank ...”

“... declaring a fervent desire to do the same thing to the Senate. The historian Cassius Dio, then a young man, was there and recalls that he and his senatorial peers were torn between laughter and terror, knowing the emperor happily murdered those who displeased him. Eventually, after 11 years of burgeoning madness, Commodus was himself murdered. The prefect of ...”

“... or divine mercy in it, the pure element, neither land nor shipping, nor anything else. Couples, young, old, male, female, mixed – the parallels that meet at infinity. A group of conspiratorial individuals, heavily bearded and hatted, exclusionary, farmers or Russians or uncles. Sketches from café life or the pleasure factories of Weimar. Orgiastic ...”

“... of fable, discreetly foreshadowed in the first pages of the book. Frédéric and a friend, when young, visited a brothel in their native town, but they were not able to enjoy its pleasures because Frédéric got scared and ran off. His friend had to leave, too, because Frédéric had the money. The last words of the novel describe a late conversation ...”

“... aristocratic, always about the business of raising himself and hiding himself, and, from a young age, brilliantly observing Britain from the top of his nose and the summit of Parnassus. From Blackpool in 1942: The best thing about this place is the potted shrimps one can buy for succour between performances! Not really a holiday attraction, of ...”

“... By my count​ , of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz ...”

“... become obvious that the Tories were going to lose the election? Was it that golden moment when Michael Portillo, that scourge of unnecessary public spending, announced that £60m of public money was earmarked for a new yacht for the richest woman on earth – even though Her Majesty had made it plain she did not want one? Was it this deranged belief in the ...”

“... Michael Pye has now written two books (the first with Lynda Myles) trying to explain how American show business feels to those who make their lives inside it. The first, The Movie Brats, succeeds because it keeps close to the work of the young film-makers with whose careers it’s concerned, but also because they demonstrably exist as a group ...”

“... put it in British Rail parlance, the wrong sort of prodigy, i.e. not a rebel or iconoclast, but a young man who pleased and impressed his elders. He was a dishy and precocious 16-year-old – still chaperoned by his banker father – when he first appeared at the epicentre of the weird and fevered Viennese literary scene, the Café Griensteidl opposite the ...”