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“... at first, but by the second day he can’t work because he’s troubled by a child practising the French horn, by the din from a sawmill and by happy children playing outside, whom he eventually yells at: ‘Why don’t you go and pick mushrooms?’ He then discovers that the children belong to his neighbour, a sleep-deprived shift worker at the local mill ...”

“... standards of Central Europe: alongside Czech schools, it could boast German gymnasia, Russian and French lycées, and an English grammar school. It was to the last that his parents sent the nine-year-old Ernest in 1935, perhaps prudently preparing for a time when they would have to flee mainland Europe. They almost left it too late; they were fortunate to ...”

“... the linguistic theories of Hermann Usener on the names of the gods, the baggy cultural history of Karl Lamprecht and even Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (‘At last a book that helps me’). His interest in the rendering of agitated draperies in Renaissance Italian art – particularly those of Botticelli, the subject of his ...”

“... in the early 20th century, and adopted much the same way of life. He was in love with modern French literature, and out of love with his native academy. He wanted to drift and burrow in a city that seemed ‘more like home’ to him than Berlin – the phrase crops up in a letter from 1913 – but at the same time deeply strange, deeply alien. Mostly he ...”

“... bedevilled gay politics for as long as there has been gay politics. The first homosexual activist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who began his efforts around 1862, divided human males at first into ‘Dionings’ and ‘Urnings’, the latter defined in a famous phrase as men with a woman’s soul confined by a man’s body. But Ulrichs later became dissatisfied with ...”

“... little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight ...”

“... crescent when Rupert spots in a pile of abandoned stuff outside one of the houses, a rise and fall French light fitting, white pottery shade, a little battered, but with the counterweight intact. It’s a nice find, though, like its ex-owners, we don’t need the fitting, but if we did … It’s cheering for R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the ...”

“... into a 12-volume edition that appeared at the turn of the 20th century. It was read by the young Karl Jaspers during the First World War, and made him into Kierkegaard’s first philosophical disciple. Jaspers coined the notion of Existenzphilosophie, meaning a systematic philosophy of ‘choice’ and ‘authenticity’, of which Kierkegaard was supposed to ...”

“... she said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks. Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger in 1948 There are plenty of photographs of Brennan, but the one I remember is Karl Bissinger’s from 1948. Her black collar is high, and her eyes look behind him to a corner of the room; she’s not avoiding ...”

“... help had joyfully learnt its language: relatives rolled about laughing when Elias recited a French story he had learnt at school with a strong British accent. The father, a gentle, civilised man, hoped that his eldest son would go to university in England and perhaps become a doctor or teacher. Had he lived, his son’s destiny would have been very ...”

“... and parotid glands. Building on another century’s worth of thinking and research, the French naturalist René Réaumur trains a kite to swallow and regurgitate small porous tubes of food, to discover the role of gastric juices; and Spallanzani – who also did important work on parthenogenesis in tadpoles and on the role of sperm – swallowed and ...”

“... socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did practically nothing’. But on such days he must have been working at ...”

“... to act’ differentiates Brecht’s attitude from that of some others on the Left – such as Karl Korsch, from whose teaching on Marxist dialectics he learned a great deal – whose criticisms of the Soviet Union or of KPD policy led them to justify an inactivity and passivity which he found unacceptable. But, though he remained sceptical and independent ...”

“... the most important figure in the history of political thought. The renovation of Italy after the French revolutionary interlude brought, in Mazzinian nationalism, the archetype ol the new ‘age of nationalities’. After World War One, the crisis of the new and precarious national state engendered Fascism, an invention which, less than two decades ...”

“... oriented towards Europe, especially to France and Spain. Most Cuban writers could read and write French fluently, but very few had any English. The only thing American that was truly influential – and this only at a popular level – were Hollywood movies, as pervasive in Cuba then as they are in England now. Those remarkable achievements I mentioned ...”