“... deputies’, calling it a ‘moral insurrection’. With his diminutive stature (he was five foot three), awkward manner (he avoided eye contact and suffered from nervous tics in his neck, shoulders, eyelids and hands), unimpressive appearance (pointy features, hooded eyes and sallow, pockmarked skin) and cold, priggish disposition (more than one critic ...”

“... is not quite the same as closing the account. His novel is a tour de force: it scarcely puts a foot wrong, evokes people and places with a wonderfully shrewd, unloving eye. Parent doesn’t spare himself, or paint himself as less vain and selfish and enclosed then he is. But then we are left with that feeling which is sometimes generated by the good ...”

“... grotesque that I pay much attention. One day three bombers – one in a vehicle, two on foot – attacked the entrance to the Green Zone normally used by journalists attending press conferences. A surviving policeman said that one bomb was concealed in a coffin strapped to the roof of a van. The driver had got through a checkpoint by saying he was ...”

“... and behaviour. Sperry began to look at the development of this apparatus in a school dominated by Paul Weiss and a romantic view of nerve cells. It has been thought that nerve cells gently argued out their final destiny in the manner of a Vienna café klatsch. A Yankee from Connecticut, Sperry repeated a very simple experiment which had been done by Stone at ...”

“... so he informs us, by Geo. ‘On all the islands I’d visited, I’d watched fishermen push out 14-foot home-built skiffs through the surf and come back with tuna as big as aero engines, looking complacently silvery and riveted. That enterprise struck me as dangerous; at sea the boats were no bigger than walnut shells and everywhere I looked I saw ...”

“... claim as his excuse, invaded Silesia and swiftly captured Bresslau. Now the boot was on the other foot, but the confessional balance remained largely unchanged: the Protestant Hohenzollerns not only tolerated Catholicism but actively courted the hierarchy, which they sought to keep out of the Habsburg orbit. Toleration was also extended to the Jews, who were ...”

“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... For Gissing,’ Paul Delany notes, ‘writing was a grim and lonely task, made grimmer by one of the most disastrous family lives of any English writer. At times this misery threatened to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life ...”

“... as the Bonheur studio evolved into a family enterprise with a clear chain of command. One visitor, Paul Delaroche, recalled: ‘There was nothing simpler and more touching than this household with its patriarchal ways.’ And yet, when her father urged her to sign her first works as Raimond, Bonheur refused: the name Rosa, she insisted, was more befitting of ...”

“... when Borrow claimed to have been living with gypsies – in particular, with a splendid woman, six foot tall like himself, whom he called ‘Isopel Berners’: he had been working as a tinker and speaking the gypsy language. The ‘autobiographies’ were obviously a mixture of fact and fiction – and suspicious readers wondered whether the same might be true ...”

“... In Frognal, Sayre met Charlie Chaplin (depicted as arrogant, politically obtuse and unfunny), Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and Waldo Salt, the critics Harold Clurman and Ken Tynan, the musicians Larry Adler and Yip Harburg, as well ...”

“... a xeroxed paper, datelined ‘Hackney, September 1995’ – not Kaplan territory. The author was Paul Richards, who works in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Richards accused Kaplan of arguing ‘that there is no political problem worthy of note in Sierra Leone’ and the piece of being ‘poorly researched’. He took Kaplan to ...”

“... little man, with a staccato, military manner’, according to the historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen. He spent his life championing Freud, but even Freud described him as ‘a disagreeable person, who wants to display himself in ruling, angering and agitating’, and referred to him once as ‘the liar from Wales’. Still, it’s possible that it ...”

“... dialogue; or as Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This ...”

“... castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family ...”