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“... title for the third section of his book, which describes Brecht and Benjamin in the South of France, discussing Proust and Schiller’s court case, debating whether a play could be made out of a detective story, and plotting to set up an International Society of Materialist Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic – this organisation was ...”

“... circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring – Russia and France 1882-1934. Taruskin’s book goes as far as the opera Mavra, while Walsh’s first volume gets to the beguiling melodrama Persephone and the beginning of work on the Concerto for two pianos. On the way he takes in Stravinsky’s astonishing self-creation ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”

“... scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz (Luxembourg). In the work of these and other scholars, the dynamics of European integration emerge in a cooler, more searching light than in van Middelaar’s panegyrics, revealing what these omit ...”

“... been sent from Sirius to found a secret brotherhood on earth, is certainly one of the strangest. Peter Sellers should be living at this hour to play P.B., a cross between the retarded sage of Being There and the monk of Terry Southern’s Candy. Born Raphael Hurst, a Jewish Londoner, in 1898, P.B. transformed himself by means of cosmetic surgery, extensive ...”

“... their creativity. Although Jews have made a notable contribution to the literature of England and France, Italy and Russia, their achievements (Reich-Ranicki claims) are not remotely comparable to those of German Jews, who experienced more extreme forms of persecution and anguish. His roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin ...”

“... scythe towards Singapore.’ The blurb-writer has got his campaign wrong. That was May 1940, in France and Belgium, when the opponents were German. The Japanese forces landed in Malaya were considerably smaller than the Allied armies facing them, but under the redoubtable General Yamashita (hanged in 1948 for war crimes), they knew what to do and how to do ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... and the shutters have been folded back so that the room opens directly onto Camden High Street. In France or New York this would excite no comment. In London, or in Camden Town at any rate, it draws the jeers of every passing drunk. Kids on their way to the Emerald Ballroom stop and stare. Jovial blacks. To dine like this in England is somehow to advertise ...”

“... To my mind, it is useless to search for an explanation. It is a kind of genius. And the critic Peter Heyworth wrote of her Medea in the theatre at Epidaurus: ‘Maria Callas is much nearer to ancient Greece than to revolutionary France. While Cherubini trundles out his clichés, she storms the heights with ...”

“... and semi- autobiographical psychodrama’ of gender roles, incest and revenge she made with Peter Whitehead, which was slated by critics). She also produced consumer items such as furniture, scarves, inflatable toy Nanas – ‘my dream is for things to be in the street, for everyone, so kids can play with them’ – and jewellery and perfume in ...”

“... died when special forces stormed the building in 2002. The opaque circular forms depicted in Peter Lanyon’s Black Stone (1964), Jennifer Dickson’s In Limbo (1967) and Jem Southam’s Ditchling Beacon (1999) recall a wonderful moment in Shadow Sites I when the mirror of a pond or small reservoir stares darkly up at us out of the arid ...”

“... Toby. His mother, he tells us, died of a heart attack two years ago. He hates brown and yellow, France, his foodstuffs touching on the plate, and the sight of four yellow cars in a row (an experience presumably so rare that it suggests some calculation on his part to avoid having a bad day). Christopher’s candour is winning: I made my own list in response ...”

“... were killed. Very “Dick”, somehow.’) Later, as a self-satisfied bestselling author: ‘Peter has to write a third leader on Mosley and the BUF. I told him I’d met Mosley and been impressed with the man . . . a fair amount of what Mosley says, in the current climate, can’t be dismissed as fanaticism or bombast – he’s no Mussolini.’ And ...”

“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”