“... insulate the reader from everyday life just as surely as writing them had done for him. So writing took up most of his time. The only problem was that he also had a wife and two children, one of whom, Lucia, he seemed more intent on gathering into his art than recognising as a person in her own right. Or rather, if Carol Loeb Shloss’s account is to be ...”

“... itself. The infamous ‘war guilt’ clause was right: Germany together with Austria-Hungary took the decision to start a war in the Balkans and to accept the risk that war in the Balkans would set off a wider European one. At the time, and in retrospect, it was folly. Russia had made it clear that, having backed off on earlier occasions, it would ...”

“... and reworked by middle-class men with sexual anxieties of their own. ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, John Addington Symonds recalled, ‘brought the emotional tumour which was gathering within me to maturity,’ inspiring him to write a long passionate poem about cross-class love between men, including a section entitled ‘Kay’. Were the sexual ...”

“... happened? Either he was not in the castle at the time (as he asserted), or, if he was, the murder took place without his knowledge. Curiously, Mortimer himself thinks that this might have been the case with the man he supposes was dispatched in Edward’s place: ‘it is by no means impossible,’ he writes in the EHR article, that the murderers ‘were ...”

“... itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great artists who supported, opposed or somehow survived in Nazi Bayreuth. She details Busch’s disgust, Toscanini’s theatrical outrage, Furtwängler’s meekness and Tietjen’s compromises, but ignores the ...”

“... torments and frightful beasts painted like jewels. More recently, the awakened creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, and H.R. Giger’s alien in the films of the same name are offered only in brief glimpses, to tease the audience, which wants to look long and hard on their strange and extraordinary beauty. Aesthetically as well as practically, it ...”

“... British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy ...”

“... that Roosevelt had had a change of heart. French expatriates in Washington, notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s ...”

“... divide, if only just. Mozart’s last symphonies placed high demands on his players and took the music out of the reach of the talented amateurs who not infrequently joined professional bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his ...”

“... doubted. In the Thomas household there was never an end to worrying about money – ‘the family took it for granted that my father had to worry about his income at the end of every month’ – for few of Dr Thomas’s patients paid promptly and many not at all, though ‘some sent in small cheques, once every few months.’ Thus the domestic economy of the ...”

“... Algren and, as if taking revenge on Partisan Review she called him when she got to Chicago. Algren took her through the Polish neighbourhood, where he lived ‘alongside an alley full of steaming trash cans and flapping newspapers’, as she later wrote, in a two-room apartment without a bath. He introduced her to skid-row bars and the black ghetto. He brought ...”

“... joke with her,’ O’Hagan said, ‘that she would one day be President of a new Ireland.’ She took down some of the photographs and showed them to me. I noted the smiles and the drinks and the look of songs being sung. ‘I really enjoyed Rosemary’s company,’ Ms O’Hagan said. 12. Raymond, my Unionist, wouldn’t come to the phone. I rang him from ...”

“... go water-skiing. I wasn’t struck down again in the same way until May 1980 when I inadvertently took an aspirin. I remember looking in the glass and thinking that my face seemed to be acquiring an interesting artistic pallor, when I suddenly passed out, the aspirin having made my stomach bleed. That, too, was around my birthday, but in the intervening years ...”

“... have known about that,’ and she might add, ‘Or could you?’ and these coincidences she then took, and expected me to take, as more interesting than what I had asked her. Certainly she never gave me the information I asked for. But she never answered any question that I put to her. She did not like it if one person talked to another. From time to time my ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”