“... jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and Streisand, her mother and nine-year-old brother moved first to her maternal grandparents’ house in Bed-Stuy and later to a housing project in Flatbush with Diana’s second husband, Lou Kind.The loss of her father and the experience ...”

“... to liberation, involving risk, experiment and the courage to fail. In the early 1970s she set up camp in Saint-Denis at the margins of the capital and the banlieues, at ease in a département that had been run by the Communist Party since Liberation in 1944. She had plans to document the neighbourhood, with its mainly working-class residents – many of ...”

“... Also cited in the FHA investigation was Fred Trump’s partner, contractor and financier William ‘Willie’ Tomasello, who according to the federal Organised Crime Task Force was associated with elements of both the Gambino and Genovese families.Fred Trump appeared to be grooming Fred Jr to take over his business. But he was a harsh and exigent ...”

“... eluding any certifiable definition by journalists, historians, scholars, aid and lending experts, camp followers, demographers, catastrophists and optimists, or by individuals of very different persuasions who happen to inhabit it. In a long moment of desperation, Davidson’s remains the least peremptory evaluation on offer – and by far the most ...”

“... influential in these areas, has acquired a quasi-public status. True, the ‘contemporary art’ camp can be extremely touchy too. There was outrage in 1991, when a student at the relatively conservative RCA was refused his degree for not doing anything his teachers considered proper work. His degree show was an empty studio with a simulacrum of a GLC Blue ...”

“... justifies Thomas Bernhard’s choice of Brendel as a leading representative of the establishment camp which Glenn Gould stands against. For in Der Untergeher Bernhard did not just want to oppose Gould to any old virtuoso pianist, but to pianists thought by the establishment to be the best, to pianists, above all, highly regarded by the thoughtful for their ...”

“... probably should have done nothing, but sending the cable made my life sweeter,’ he told William Alfred. A week or so earlier Alfred had written to him saying ‘Frank has given me The Dolphin to read. It is beautifully made, every line won hard, and it is sad and comforting at one and the same time. But 1 and 2 on page 47’ – ‘Fox-Fur’ and ...”

“... in Radiance, marries a Lemian satire of Cold War militaristic capitalism to the architecture of a William Gaddis novel, or how Ted Chiang’s brainy novellas crystallise Lemian themes of metacognition and first contact.Such encounters might have challenged Lem’s biases. They might also have pushed him to confront the limits of his experience, evident in his ...”

“... and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because my favourite English Iliad is William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version, because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for its literal yet stylish ...”

“... of joke the SS would have played on a prisoner lucky enough to be released from a concentration camp, presenting him at the gates with the bill. We ought to know the name of the official who dreamed up this little wheeze so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn’t imprisoned in ...”

“... of staff by his father, took part in military operations. Mohamed Oufkir, the king’s aide de camp, was chosen to chaperone the crown prince in the field.Oufkir was a key consigliere, a security fanatic and logistics expert who had helped to organise the new army and later rose to the rank of general. He was also a French war hero: after tours in Italy ...”

“... as dearly. He helps explain how someone can be both a tender mother and a merciless concentration-camp guard, or be a just and temperate magistrate and also a chilly, rejecting father. By associating conscientiousness with cleanliness, and by associating both not only with obsessional neurosis but also (as he does elsewhere) with the religious impulse and ...”

“... in the desert as the dawn breaks and the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the camp. The cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke, dissipates as the heat takes charge. Their camel wakes, blinks and slowly rises on her haunches. The few remaining members of the tribe mount. She belches, and sets off on the long ...”

“... to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my ...”

“... crimsons’ – part of the Customs compound which, 15 years later, became the classrooms where William Empson taught English during the Sino-Japanese War, encountering his own brigands outside the city walls (as described in the London Review of 5 October 1995). At Mengtze, wedlock all but crumbled. Stella fell out of love, my father into hurt ...”