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“... cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash at Yale – is still v. buff – and has pledged to help me push the wheelchair around. Neither of us has been ...”

“... cabaret-owner and trainer of young talent. Badia’s career as a dancer ended around World War Two, but her true heir and disciple was Tahia Carioca, who was, I think, the finest belly-dancer ever. Now 75 and living in Cairo, she is still active as an actress and political militant, and, like Um Kalthoum, the remarkable symbol of a national culture. Um ...”

“... is among the most racially-divided societies anywhere. Within a huge mulatto and black under-class, racked by permanent unemployment, drugs and Aids, homicide is the leading cause of death among young males. American economic hegemony, taken for granted a generation ago, is being eroded by the successes of Japan and the EEC. In the southern Americas the ...”

“... recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick observations on Norwegians (‘devoted to patriotism, ecological uprightness, liberated but worried ...”

“... problematic. Mandela is now an homme d’état, accountable largely to the business and political class. Like all grandees, he publishes with an eye to present duties (no less than to posterity). The result is too much retrospective homily and oiling, not to say greasing, of troubled waters; the reader soon feels like a gull in a tanker spillage. The resumé ...”

“... rewriting for our days of Vanity Fair. Like Thackeray’s, Wolfe’s satire is ‘a declaration of war on the established order of things’. And in the style of Thackeray’s ‘How to live on nothing a year’ Wolfe offers at the centre of his black comedy a hilariously plausible accounting of how in New York you can go broke on $980,000 a year (‘the ...”

“... Wilder and Zinneman), as did about twenty producers; only one actor agreed; in the spectator class there were about ten programmers and nearly forty critics, all of them contributors to Time Out. The results were published last month. The list of best directors, 14 of them, includes neither Buñuel nor Rossellini nor Godard nor Mizoguchi and the list of ...”

“... was a prophetic mirage. What that involved was the discovery of an entire supranational social class equipped with equivalent electric powers. Geographical Tibet was not on this menu. However, Lenin did think that a virtual-Tibetan élite of superman-monks was required to galvanise the proletariat. Attempts to realise these prophecies – and the struggle ...”

“... and held that many other mental illnesses are accompanied by hallucinations. Just before World War Two, Kurt Schneider produced a list of 12 ‘First Rank Symptoms’, with auditory hallucinations top of the list. When First Rank Symptoms ruled the diagnostic roost, a lot more people became schizophrenic than would ever have been so classified in the wards ...”

“... the composer thought he had transcribed (in reality, older Gypsies had taken the tunes from middle-class Magyars), Liszt saw ideal music-making as both untutored and improvisatory. Manuel de Falla had the same inspiration, as did Lorca. Having discovered among Andalusian Gypsies the authentic cante jondo – ‘deep song’ – they both thought modern ...”

“... international benefactors. Then again, in the ideologically-charged aftermath of the Second World War, most of the nations of the emergent Third World chose to listen to the siren song of the developed world. India, in stark contrast, under the influence of those associated with the Nehru-Mahalanobis model of development, elected to develop its own industrial ...”

“... transformation taking place over the period of the Belle Epoque, speeded up by the First World War, and definitively achieved by the 1920s. Other countries might give different dates. The English might point to the fact that it was in 1865 that so many people wished to be present at the Eton and Harrow cricket match that ropes had to be put up around the ...”

“... of M&B readers were not, as prejudice had it, the descendants of mill girls, but well-educated Class A ladies. Another nugget of research aired again here is the survey undertaken in 1970 into the distribution of bookshops in England. (No surprises: ‘the best provision of bookshops per head of the population is found in the south-east.’) More ...”

“... and superintendent of the Sunday School, a son who was in his youth himself a teacher in the Bible class. The post office was in the same building as the excellent public library, which was based on the collection left by the engineer Thomas Telford, and to this the boy had free access and benefited in no common way. Moreover, there was a marvellous ...”

“... inauthentic. The queen is Harriet Scrope, novelist, plot-stealer and ferocious egotist, whose war against the world she inhabits extends to her best friend and her cat. As a comic portrait of the artist, Harriet scores high. She is estranged and she is hostile. She is a bit like Dyer. ‘Tho’ I was young Thomas Chatterton to those I met, I was a very ...”