“... and pheasant to the boys after the annual Ritterakademie ball led to a raid on the stores by a young Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau. General Schleicher dined well at Horcher’s restaurant; Frau Ebert was partial to marzipan tart. General Seeckt drank beer, Ernst Röhm drank wine, Herbert Bismarck drank practically anything (like father, like son). A jolly ...”

“... been turned over to pedestrian precincts full of boutiques, bars and picture galleries, enjoyed by young technocrat couples (with two cars, two children and one poodle) who drink whisky and are obsessed with their bronzage. But Richard’s greatest contribution to history is surely his understanding of individuals and their behaviour to each other. ‘I have ...”

“... their anarchic force and the opposing force holding them in position. Writing in 1896-7, the young Bernhard Berenson spoke of ‘the exquisite modelling of Cézanne, who gives the sky its tactile values as perfectly as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure’. Michelangelo’s is not one of the names commonly brought up in talk about ...”

“... Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of Weber to an American public, with whom it proved immensely influential – a version that was re-exported back to post-war West Germany as the intellectual ...”

“... argues for the latter and points out that Wainwright happily organised group outings when he was a young accountant’s clerk. When the couple became estranged, he argues, Wainwright accepted the necessity of being solitary and manufactured virtues from it. It seems more complex than that. I think he embraced the necessity. Assiduously he secreted the ...”

“... life. The heroine escapes from her family to solitude and books (‘Thomson’s Seasons, Young’s Night-Thoughts and Paradise Lost’), and finds an older woman, Ann, who seems ready to become her life-companion. Ann’s health declines and Mary accompanies her to Lisbon, where she meets Henry, ‘a man of refinement’. But Ann dies, Henry, a ...”

“... Science of Mechanics, a generation after it was published, that fired the imagination of a young Albert ...”

“... not go away. Serious writers seem unable to keep their hands off him, from Beryl Bainbridge’s Young Adolf to George Steiner’s A.H., and the bibliography grows at a pace unmatched by Stalin or Mao. A survey five years ago counted 120,000 pieces of work on Hitler. We have had serious biographers, like Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest, and we have had ...”

“... decision to sell Louisiana was only one, and perhaps not the most important. Might the aggressive young American republic have found a way to expand westward even if Napoleon had not willingly ceded it the vast, thinly populated and largely undefended Louisiana territory? Quite possibly. Latin American independence would probably have come about as well, even ...”

“... each of which ended with the resounding failure of the prime minister’s presidential bid.The young Mitterrand’s intuition that the president’s powers would keep growing has proved correct. In 2000, constitutional reform sought to make the risk of cohabitation less likely, by aligning the president’s term with that of the National Assembly: it was ...”

“... comes up everywhere in his fiction. One of his short stories, ‘The Darling’, is about a pretty young thing whom no man can resist. Her father is one such and has his incestuous brains splattered over the kitchen table with his own Walther-P38 (it ‘virtually ruined the checkered tablecloth’, the narrative primly notes). Dolores then goes upstate to San ...”

“... of Windsor, as soundproof as the walls of all those castles they processed around. Who knew of David Windsor’s dereliction of duty in favour of love (or whatever it was) until a week before the Abdication? Well, quite a lot of people actually, but not the readers of the popular (as in lower orders) press. Marion Crawford, governess to Lilibet and ...”

“... There are three false starts in David Mitchell’s slippery new novel. At the beginning of number9dream the narrator sits in a chaotic Tokyo café staring into an empty coffee cup. Eiji Miyake is a mousy young man who has come to the city to find his father, but he lacks the wherewithal to contact the lawyer who knows his address ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...”