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“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... later in the story we shall find him described as ‘his Lordship’. In his room at the inn, this young man fills his glass from a blue-and-white decanter of madeira and then puts on ‘a damask night-gown (at that period a loose informal coat, not what it means today) over his long waistcoat and breeches. He has also taken his wig off, revealing that he is ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... He likes to brag about his drug use and his sexual appetites. He treats the personal space of the young women around him – constant props in his endless publicity stunts – with the sort of disregard you’d expect from a 1970s disc jockey rather than a successful 21st-century businessman. No one would mistake Richard Branson for Roman Abramovich, any more ...”

“... Rozanov had made an unnecessary journey from Moscow to Gorky, simply in order to sleep with a young blind woman.’ He is a poet, she is a student of his work whom he has never met before. It is a hot October night in the early 1980s and after copulation (‘acrobatic but lacking in finesse’), Rozanov and his partner find themselves unable to sleep. He ...”

“... in her conception of herself. The pictorial evidence is contradictory; but it appears that as a young woman she had good features, a fine, keen, intelligent face, somewhat spoiled by prominent front teeth, which were removed when she was 40. She retained childhood memories of being rejected in favour of prettier girls; and in middle life she wrote of trying ...”

“... and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard’s originator emerges in David Gilmour’s entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject’s own fastidiousness? In the brief, lyrical memoir Lampedusa wrote in 1955, he invoked with unequivocal passion the ...”

“... sport and considered the gap between the IOC’s claims and the reality of its actions. David Miller’s Igniting the Games is not that book. As its subtitle suggests, it is primarily a celebration of Bach’s heroic attempts to surmount the crisis. Miller has past form for leaving out uncomfortable facts. His official history of the IOC describes ...”

“... of it remained unchanged for much longer than has generally been supposed. Later on, a cluster of young historical ecologists based at Monks Wood Experimental Station, outside Huntingdon, deepened and widened some of Hoskins’s pioneer perceptions, adding support to them with biological data. Beginning to overtake all of these in practical ...”

“... however, get to hear about another occasion, when Pound, Joyce and Eliot met the ambitious young publisher, Horace Liveright, also in Paris, on 3 January 1922. Liveright, who had already published Pound, was touring Europe in search of new writers. Publisher and poet courted each other assiduously. The outcome was that Liveright agreed to publish ...”

“... is the subject of about a fifth of that total, from the copies and life studies he made as a young man in the 1850s through the early history paintings to the naturalistic studies of the 1870s and 1880s and beyond. This encyclopedic survey of womanhood has recently attracted a great deal of attention, much of it stimulated by the massive 1988 exhibition ...”

“... and his brother Konrad were educated at a progressive boarding school and joined the Communist Young Pioneers. When Hitler came to power the family fled, after brief stops in Switzerland and France, to the Great Soviet Union the boys had heard so much about. Markus remained there for 11 years, becoming ‘Misha’ and acquiring fluent Russian during a ...”

“... talks the trumpeter Al Hirt into allowing him to attend his concert, or when the lovestruck young man persuades a janitor to allow him and Hillary into a museum that had closed for the day. But there is also and much more often a genuine love of interpersonal exchange for its own sake (brilliantly caught in John Travolta’s portrayal of the Clinton ...”

“... the Vietnam years have also been circulating recently, some of them apparently to be trusted (the young John Kerry standing with the crew of his gunboat), others notoriously faked: the young John Kerry on a podium with ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda at an antiwar rally. A half-hour before midnight on 30 April, far from prime ...”

“... second car thought to have been involved in the crime. Nicola Sacco, 29 and happily married with a young son, was a trusted employee in another shoe factory; Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 31 and single, peddled fish in the streets. They had eked out a living in the United States for just over a decade, and still spoke relatively little English. (In jail, their English ...”