“... revising, since any sophisticated account of pleasure shares a boundary with elegy.By the time of Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, published just under a decade later, the world of Aids seemed all-engulfing, a maze with only one exit. The finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, nicknamed ‘The Farewell’, was supposedly a sidelong intervention into ...”

“... would comfort the dying more often than saving the living. But the deeper purpose was moral: the white-uniformed nurses would serve as emblems of moral courage and symbols of Allied values, their femininity contrasting with the masculinity defined by the Totenkopf and the black uniforms of the SS. Naturally, Weil wanted to be among the first nurses ...”

“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”

“... up his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the ...”

“... of some fifty thousand people were moving towards Wenceslas Square. The violence which the police (white helmets, riot shields and truncheons) used to disperse the crowd led to some broken limbs and numerous concussions, but there were no deaths. This is how Czechoslovakia’s ‘kind of peaceable revolution’ began, and it was over, without any further ...”

“... the cells – not the houses but the spaces between the houses. On the atlas, there is not much white space left. Antarctica remains a sort of common territory, on paper the site of all kinds of ambitious sectoral claims by nation-states but in practice a place of reasonably friendly, treaty-bound co-operation between research stations. The main body of the ...”

“... for this was Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage ...”

“... consisted in desultory exercises in Christ Church Meadows, and lectures on map-reading given by Edmund Blunden. I worked hard at Oxford, but what I wanted from it was to meet extraordinary, over-life size characters. In the hothouse atmosphere, generated by the imminence of war, I was not to be disappointed, and the fact that this would all disappear, and ...”

“... involved. The marriage lasted 82 days before Louis succumbed, possibly to overexcitement. Wearing white for mourning, Mary Rose was sequestered until it could be known if she was carrying a child. She was not, but during this period ‘la reine blanche’ felt vulnerable: the new king, Francis, would penetrate her seclusion and make insinuations. She thought ...”

“... Beaux Arts’, which describes Bruegel’s Icarus, in which ‘the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water’. This slight pause or swoop tells of a captivation that exists before, and possibly after, any considered judgment about the thing ostensibly being described: a boy is falling out of the sky and into the sea, but ...”

“... lists human fat among the ingredients of his wonder-working oglio del Scoto; in Webster’s White Devil, Isabella dreams of preserving the flesh of her rival, Vittoria, ‘like mummia’, while in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola imagines the body of the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green ...”

“... to borrow two dollars for a taxi fare. ‘All of this,’ he noted, ‘happened in front of Edmund Wilson and his wife, Virgil [Thomson], Mrs Otto Kahn and poor Lady Ribblesdale.’ What happened to Capote, as he began to visualise In Cold Blood in Kansas in 1959 and 1960, is immensely complex. The story of how he manipulated his sources is a godsend ...”

“... Edition was supposed to represent its essence. As late as 13 June 1910 he could still write, to Edmund Gosse, that ‘black depression – the blackness of darkness & the cruellest melancholia – are my chronic enemy and curse.’ And just as he began to feel some stirrings of improvement, he suffered a second crushing loss with the death – in August ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... Kong she met Alexis Vedeniapine, a British army officer. Olubas tells us that Vedeniapine was ‘a White Russian, born in St Petersburg in 1916’ who had escaped the Russian Revolution with his family and was brought up in Shanghai before being sent to boarding school in, of all places, Woodford, Essex. From there he entered agricultural college, and worked ...”