“... eyeing me through a bookshop window. Benjamin Haydon’s touching and slightly impertinent young likeness (the original is in the National Portrait Gallery) graced a book called Fiery Heart. No surprise there. Many people call their books things like that. But then I saw the subtitle: ‘The First Life of Leigh Hunt’. That stopped me in my ...”

“... Tale of the Heike, newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily ...”

“... economical with the truth. A rival anthrax vaccine had been produced by Jean-Joseph Toussaint, a young professor at Toulouse Veterinary School, who treated the bacteria with antiseptic to kill them. His approach, in other words, was fundamentally different from Pasteur’s, which was to enfeeble, but not kill, the organisms by growing them at high ...”

“... the British government forced universities to introduce doctorates in order to dissuade ambitious young British researchers from going to Germany to gain their PhDs. Of equal importance was the global influence of German culture, above all music. German conservatories offered a rigorous training that couldn’t be found elsewhere, backed by the hegemony of ...”

“... or early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his ...”

“... in Blood Meridian, suggests Late Victorian romance rather than American or Russian extremism, King Arthur rather than Captain Ahab or Prince Mishkin. ‘His origins are become remote as his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Babylon as ‘people in a transparent elevator’, or when he flippantly notes that Degas’s young spartans ‘crouch and stretch purely for the benefit of the artist’. Such moments are surprisingly rare. More often one finds oneself in niggling disagreement. For instance, at the apex of Juan Gris’s collage, Breakfast (1914), he discovers ‘a packet ...”

“... did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives ...”

“... for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there and ‘fervently kissed several parts of her divine body’. When he did so again on his next visit, he ‘began ...”

“... knees. The bullet entered his buttock and went straight through his heart. Someone had filmed the young man’s death, so there was no doubt about what he was doing. Widgery concluded that the bullet which got him must have been intended for someone else. The likelihood, suggested by the evidence and by what happened everywhere else, that Doherty had been ...”

“... other at length? As for the army 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 ...”

“... flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still young in English and his pleasure in it – in bending and stretching it – is unselfconscious but palpable. As MacInnes points out, he invokes any comparison, uses any term or turn of phrase, that will convey the impression he is after, but though he is bold he ...”

“... first mentor in what he called the ‘fantastic American science of showbusiness’ was his uncle Arthur, an antiques dealer friendly with Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker. Arthur introduced him to the circus, then to nightclubs and music halls. As de Baecque points out, Melville’s gangster films invariably include a ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”