“... his one attempt at loving someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, ‘How kind you are to yourself,’ and tells him to ‘rest easy’. ‘After all,’ she says, ‘that is where your happiness lies.’ Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a ...”

“... In the village of Les Estables, near the mountain of Gerbier de Jonc, where the Loire rises, a young geometer participating in the first attempt to map the whole of France is hacked to pieces by the locals. We are in the early 1740s: an increasingly powerful monarchy is seeking to control the ‘jumble of old fiefdoms’, but the rural population see ...”

“... Wasp cultural inheritance and its anglophile geopolitical allegiances: the replica Globe that a young Sam Wanamaker saw at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934 was funded by the British government, and when Wanamaker came to London in 1949 and found no such structure marking the former site of the real Globe he was surprised and disappointed. ‘By this ...”

“... of ‘undesirables’ in the summer of 1940 included nearly ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her ...”

“... a nail gets knocked in so thoroughly that no one need touch it again, and this is the case with Michael Mill-gate’s biography, which is surely, if the word means anything, definitive. Millgate has been in a strong position to make it so. He has already written a detailed study of the novels, he is evidently a close student of the poetry, and with Purdy is ...”

“... Ciaran Thapar that she felt ‘a growing sense of doom’ when she started being asked to help young people, particularly teenage boys, travel home without using public transport. If all else failed, she booked them minicabs. The teenagers Knell-Taylor worked with were caught up in a growing wave of tit-for-tat violence. Local rivalries and adolescent ...”

“... the region’s death knell. Despite the outward migration of the mobile population – largely the young and the employed – the numbers of unemployed have risen to match this catastrophic decline in manufacturing industry. The official data show that one in every four of the city’s able-bodied residents is now standing in the dole queues: if there is an ...”

“... the roads have potholes which could hide the many vagrant horses, donkeys and sheep; and young boys hang from the signposts till they are wildly twisted about. To find your way is pleasantly difficult – but even more pleasant is the difficulty of being found. Among other splendid things,‘the West’ is the land of transplanted urban dream ...”

“... or fairies. When Synge quickened a fire by holding a newspaper against the mouth of the chimney, a young woman called him a sorcerer: ‘It’s to hell you’ll be going by and by.’ When the De Profundis was recommended to Synge to ward off evil spirits it was clear to him that the traffic also flowed in the opposite direction. Or in every direction: the ...”

“... with Love (1959), an autobiographical account of the hostility and prejudice he encountered as a young schoolteacher in the East End, gets only a fleeting namecheck. And it’s remarkable how few artists and writers are featured. Their inclusion would presumably strike the authors as being too evocative of those cheerful Commission for Racial Equality ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... of Lady Cunard (whom he detested), he was now able to launch himself, a successful and unattached young literary lion, into loftier social circles. Mr Amory has edited the letters meticulously. To a letter of July 1931 he appends 31 footnotes identifying those mentioned. They include one future duke, one earl, one younger son of a marquess, one daughter of a ...”

“... I propose to leave the first two out of discussion: The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast, ‘a fantasy for young readers’ that is as hard-edged and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember ...”

“... into Sonora. The wolf is soon taken from him, as ‘contraband’, as the horse is taken from the young boy in All the Pretty Horses. After being exhibited in a fair, she is set to fight against dogs on a hacienda: wolf-baiting as a sport for the betting man. In a spectacular scene, Billy rescues the wolf from her tormentors, but only at the ...”

“... not only did it do splendidly at the box office, but it also won the endorsement of both the young Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with Sartre (whose life is strikingly similar to that of Brecht) learning the catchy tunes by heart.’ As an approach, this is about as discriminating as the ducking-stool, and will no doubt draw similar circles of ...”