“... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...”

“... ultimately more than eight hundred exiles, including most of the best brains in the evangelical camp. It was an exodus enthusiastically encouraged by the authorities, and in the early months of the regime Lord Chancellor Gardiner seems to have leaked advance warning of arrests, in the hope that the dissidents would take themselves off and save him the ...”

“... the present interest in neuroaesthetics. (The other, a 1999 paper by Vilayanur Ramachandran and William Hirstein entitled ‘The Science of Art’ and published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, was a sparky jeu d’esprit; as Ramachandran later admitted, ‘We mainly did it for fun.’) Here was a clear-spoken, scrupulous expositor of science ...”

“... with his attack on Keats. Keats himself was enchanted by Hazlitt’s reply in the ‘Letter to William Gifford Esq.’ and copied pages of it in his journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America, commenting on the ‘innate power with which it yeasts and words itself up – the feeling for the costume of society’. Gifford of course took the ...”

“... loveliest in England’. Eton College used to send its scouts to Tyneham for their annual summer camp. The Times photographed the harvest here in August 1929, and spread the Baldwinite result – a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of ...”

“... at the time, one can sometimes imagine him as a young Anglo-Saxon, rather like the narrator in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility, standing unobtrusively to the side of the action, a little in love with the lives he’s describing and at the same time worried about these people on whom so many difficulties have been inflicted, his grandmother ...”

“... in England, at least, tobacco addicts have a knack for smoking out the contradictions in the enemy camp. Smokers soon learn to distinguish the most prevalent form of anti-tabagisme, the ‘me-and-my-body’ school, from the campaigning kind, which is alert to a public-health issue. They also know when the first is masquerading as the second, which only ...”

“... others, as the passing of a more graceful age. Lee’s biographers used to fall into the second camp. Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography, published in 1934 and 1935, was the standard text for many decades. Freeman drove past Lee’s statue in Richmond every day on his way to work and saluted it. But more recent biographers, even those on the ...”

“... great, he was greatest in adversity’ – so thought Daniel O’Leary, his Irish aide-de-camp. He understood (or anyway learned) when boldness would pay off, or stand a good chance of paying off. In 1819, he decided to bypass the main concentration of Spanish strength in Venezuela and to liberate neighbouring, more lightly defended New Granada (the ...”

“... wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that loss of American ...”

“... on nuclear weapons. When the New Start treaty between Russia and the US was ratified in 2010, William Perry, a defense secretary under President Clinton and one of the chief advocates of nuclear nonproliferation and eventual abolition – ‘global zero’, as it has come to be known – remarked that even though the treaty was ‘small, it was ...”

“... writes to Alfred Kazin in 1944, before reassuring the burgeoning critic that he belongs ‘in our camp’. Later: ‘The reviews are incredibly vulgar, so why read them?’ One can applaud a novelist for not reading his reviews, but not reading them and obsessing about them for 60 years? This is what we might call the low style. To Melvin Tumin, just after ...”

“... in the Kremlin wall, as well as foreign Comintern luminaries such as the US union activist William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood. Physical incorporation in the walls of the citadel was the ultimate honour for the illustrious dead. As Brown says, the walls haven’t gone away. Circumvallation thrives, and not just as heritage townscape: today’s barriers are ...”

“... in 1992: ‘A Month in Dachau’, in which a Russian man takes a holiday in the German death camp to indulge in an orgy of masochism, torture and cannibalism. The ideological function of this was, of course, to draw a parallel between the Soviet and Nazi experiences as equivalent totalitarian horrors; the recurrence of this banal theme in Sorokin’s ...”

“... She joins the Cheka and in 1926 is promoted to deputy director of the Moscow region forced labour camp. She continues at this exacting post in a busy part of the Gulag until the early 1930s. We must not think that Ransome, as a foreign correspondent, was somehow shielded from the grim realities. On the contrary, his matchless contacts gave him access to the ...”