“... many of these, including volcanoes with precise eschatological trimmings (‘I saw an elderly man in braces showered by sulfur and brimstone’) and a negative version that goes not with a bang but with a whimper: It is not like a massacre, not like a bomb; there is no blood, nobody’s being mangled; it is just a swelling, a steady increase, all over ...”

“... murdered on 17 June 1914 in a forest on the outskirts of Berlin. The murderer was presumed to be a man she met through a personal ad, Paul Kuhnt, who made off with her keys and plundered her apartment. He was tried for her murder but not convicted. Carrington uses the case notes from the murder investigation to bring to ...”

“... myths that punish artists for ambition (Marsyas, Arachne etc). Randall Jarrell said a poet is a man who spends a lifetime standing out in thunderstorms waiting to be struck by lightning; that was a metaphor for inspiration, though a literal interpretation also suggests itself. Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me ...”

“... nostalgia and desire such erotic tableaux as the steeples of Martinville, or the spectacle of Mlle de Vinteuil and her friend pursuing each other round the table with the absorption and the awkwardness of large birds, or the moment before the hotel at Balbec when the narrator is accused by Charlus of the solecism of having anchors embroidered on his bathing ...”

“... best room in an overbooked hotel. In Poland for the papal visit in 1991, he’s so moved by John Paul II’s demeanour, conducting a six-hour open-air ceremony, that he seems to get close to re-conversion. ‘There was something about the singing, the colours and the beauty of the words which reminded me of strange, hard-won moments of pure contentment I had ...”

“... of sniffing commentators: can no one remember how it is for the young woman confronting the older man, so seductively marked by experience, so essentially powerful, always knowing you better than you know yourself? The entire affair would, I imagine, have reminded them of their relations with Olga Kosakiewicz, who began as Beauvoir’s pupil and went on as ...”

“... productive, but Dominique Fernandez, winner of the 1982 Goncourt Prize for the novel Dans la main de l’ange, turned 95 a little before his new memoir, Les Trois Femmes de ma vie, appeared – the three women are his grandmother, mother and wife. It wasn’t even the first book he published last year, but followed the ...”

“... State Hospital for the Criminally Insane with a copy of Alexandre Dumas’s Grand dictionnaire de cuisine open on his chest. Lecter was incarcerated for having murdered nine people ‘that we know about’, and having crippled two others, one of whom (of whom more later) was permanently attached to a respirator in Baltimore. Dr Lecter was being visited by ...”

“... No sympathy need be wasted on Duckworth, who was on to a good thing. Three Weeks, the succès de scandale of his 1907 list, stemmed from a liaison Mrs Glyn had been enjoying with a young Guards officer, Lord Alistair Innes Ker, whom she regarded as ‘emotionally sound asleep’. She had ended it because, as her grandmother had insisted, adultery was a ...”

“... A Greek translation was posted on the paper’s website. Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras (‘the man who has everyone quaking in his boots’), couldn’t have dreamed up a better election-day ruse. Bild is Germany’s bestselling newspaper, and according to the latest ABC figures, it has the highest circulation of any publication in Europe: 2.67 million ...”

“... Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of a Jewish businessman who had made his living on the black market during the Occupation ...”

“... and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As Chaucer put it in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘time wol nat abide/Fro day to night it changeth as the tide.’ When he wrote those words, a mechanical clock was being built at the abbey in St Albans: it showed the time, the position of the stars and the state of the tides at London ...”

“... guns or not. Fianna Fail was ‘a slightly constitutional party’, Sean Lemass, who succeeded de Valera as party leader in 1959, declared in 1928. Fine Gael, on the other hand, respected law and order. Its members were richer than us. Solicitors, big shopkeepers and big farmers were all Fine Gael. Secretly, we believed, they were pro-British, not as Irish ...”

“... Saatchi’s taste is eclectic. It’s not all Goldsmiths’: the 35 artists are no more than one man’s pleasure – and one woman’s duty. No one could credibly admire all these 35 varied artists or admire them equally: 35 bursts of unqualified enthusiasm would sound ridiculous. On the other hand, clear discriminations are clearly out. So a non-judgmental ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”