“... 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 ...”

“... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the ...”

“... Buchs, on the Swiss-Austrian frontier,’ he writes:We were invaded by six or seven very young Nazi officials, who took stock of our money and pored over our passports … I was bringing with me for a friend two English sporting guns, and these caused much speculation among the Nazi officials, who wanted to know the military value of such guns. I ...”

“... I had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became part of this larger thing.Did you get any help from the eminenti who’d tried to float a magazine?None at all. I didn’t really know them. And didn’t admire them, particularly. There was a whole social ...”

“... is inseparable from the character-space of the novel, and its captivation. There, as its bearers, young women occupy a position in the narrative with which A Dance cannot compete, let alone A la recherche. Like Proust, Cao was much seized of flowers, scarcely fewer varieties than Proust’s 270 appearing in The Dream, and the title of Proust’s second volume ...”

“... them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under 24, who went for the SPD much more strongly than their male counterparts. The truly dramatic change, however, came in the East. Traditionally, this was uniformly Protestant terrain, with sizeable working-class concentrations in ...”

“... British identity was in the classrooms and playing fields of English private schools. As the young ‘mongrel’ Edward Said was coming to realise, it was one thing to learn the words of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, another to appreciate that ‘this meant bright and beautiful England, the distant lodestar of good for all of us.’The muslin ...”

“... a man to go that way. I don’t know how to win like that,’ his lugubrious opposite number, Hugo Lloris, observed. Argentinians laughed derisively at such old-world pearl clutching: it worked, France missed twice, and Argentina won. At Italy 1990 Argentina knocked Brazil out by a single late goal, scored shortly after, it later emerged, the Argentine ...”