“... study of the creation of A Farewell to Arms, as well as three serial volumes of biography: The Young Hemingway (1986); Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989); and Hemingway: The American Homecoming (1992). These bring Hemingway to the decades covered in the present volumes, which conclude the life story. Hemingway: The Thirties opens in a seaside hotel on the ...”

“... consisted of her reading out loud an impossibly long series of German sentences, then making her young son repeat each in turn after her, and commit them to memory for repetition on the following day. If his repetitions were less than perfect, as inevitably happened, the child would find himself the object of his mother’s scorn. The rigours of this ...”

“... of inspiration: the sun-drenched South.On his second visit to Marrakech, Staël encountered a young painter, Jeannine Guillou, who was leading a nomadic life in Morocco with her husband and their young son, Antek. After a short while, Jeannine and Antek came to live with Staël, and, on their return from Morocco in ...”

“... concern for sound-patterns rather than content, gives way, now and again, to the image of the young poet-critic caught at an awkward moment in the argument: So I must sit on my fence, feet on the bars of the scale of relevance, head in the air of Artifice, bottom perched – very hesitantly – on the disconnected image-complex … As ...”

“... type – his most ambitious landscape painting which includes a sacred narrative – is the Saint Francis in the Frick Collection in New York, where the landscape not only provides the setting but is, as Goffen puts it, ‘a second protagonist’. The saint stands with open mouth and open hands, but he is not, as was conventional, receiving the stigmata from ...”

“... that Wells, although always capable of warmth in his private relationships, particularly with the young, gained a reputation for impatience, querulousness, petulance and ‘spoiled-childishness’ in his public character. Two departures from all amenity are certainly on record. The first of these is the manner of his falling-out with the Fabian Society, and ...”

“... while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination to be obeyed: ‘Of the three affections ...”

“... could recognise their virtues and aspirations in these pages. It is no accident that Sir Francis Levison, the novel’s theatrical villain, who is systematically punished and degraded in the book’s concluding sections, is a white-handed aristocrat, distinguished by the brilliant diamonds that he wears at all times. Isabel’s history reinforces the ...”

“... father and a mother who worked as a maid at a hotel: ‘He needed fame, but how could one so young achieve this? If he could attach his dishonoured name to a new comet, his glory and synonymously his family glory would be rung over all Japan.’ Evidently comets have to be seen as a resource for humans, a resource which can be used in lots of different ...”

“... it is neatly expressed by Marjorie Reeves: ‘the true Pope could not err, the Rule of St Francis could not be modified, therefore a pontiff who did so and manifestly erred must be the pseudo-Pope of prophecy.’ John XXII, then, was the pseudo-Pope, or Antichrist. To get all this straight, Eco introduces into his novel the historical figure of ...”

“... was born in 1872, the son of a professor of medicine in Gröningen. The young man studied Sanskrit, taking his doctorate in 1897, and his idiosyncratic path from there to the European Middle Ages shaped what he did when he arrived. Dutch history had only begun in earnest in the 16th century, so that Holland was late in producing ...”

“... of the Prince of Wales’s desire to be a tampon. In 1980, Caroline Blackwood was approached by Francis Wyndham, one of the editors of the Sunday Times magazine, to accompany Lord Snowden on a trip to photograph the 84-year-old Duchess of Windsor, now an invalid recluse, holed up in a house in Paris. Snowden would take pictures and Blackwood would record ...”

“... about. With the £500, we are on firmer ground, for it was Smith’s salary for accompanying the young Duke of Buccleuch to France in 1764, the sum that gave him the independence and leisure to write The Wealth of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not ...”

“... pieces of property owned by Lord Camelford and conveyed to trustworthy nominees. That eccentric young peer brought in his friend Tooke merely to vex the new Addington ministry. Described as ‘very old’, which, at 65, he was for a new MP, Tooke found his election challenged on the grounds, once again, that he was a clergyman. An examination of precedents ...”

“... In some of the more substantial pieces in the volume, especially ‘Political Autobiography of a Young Man’ (1960, 1962) and ‘Was I a Stalinist Too?’ (1979), Calvino gives scrupulous and painfully precise answers to these questions. Even in pain, though, his irony never deserts him – ‘irony always warns of the other side of the coin,’ he says in ...”