“... on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh himself gave ‘generous assistance’ – which warmly endorsed the idea that he had basically ‘two books in his armoury’, the first featuring the ...”

“... Wieland was hired as tutor to the crown prince, the classic occupation of the late 18th-century man of letters. Goethe arrived three years later, fresh from the Europe-wide success of The Sorrows of Young Werther. He recommended another polymath, Johann Gottfried Herder, who arrived in 1776 and became general superintendent of churches, also overseeing ...”

“... War, Cécile Sauvage, Messiaen’s mother, threw herself into an affair with her editor, Jean de Gourmont, leaving Olivier and his younger brother, Alain, to be raised by their maternal grandmother. After de Gourmont left her for another woman, Cécile retreated to a room that, in Pierre’s words, ‘was never ...”

“... intellectual circles. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Sollers, Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser are all part of Lacan and Co. Like the analysts, each of them had to take a stand for or against Lacan. Lacan would have it no other way. He charged intellectual history with the passion of transferences played out on a public ...”

“... people he met make up a name-dropper’s paradise. To one side of the inhabitants of the Almanach de Gotha, they included Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky and the Pasternak family, Ellen Key and Klara Liebknecht, Paula Modersohn-Becker, the young Balthus and his mother, Baladine Klossowska (with whom, though she came from Breslau, he corresponded in French), Lord ...”

“... of words’, as Francis Galton wrote in 1874, when he coined the dyad. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence that affects him after his birth. The distinction is clear: the one produces the infant such as it actually is, including its latent faculties of growth and mind: the other affords the environment ...”

“... as Talleyrand remarked, ‘is a matter of dates.’ And the sight of so many résistants de la dernière heure naturally encouraged cynicism. ‘Wasn’t the secret of the purge,’ Roger Peyrefitte wrote, ‘that there had to be victims so that there could be heroes?’ In a sense, it is difficult to take the opposite view: advocates of the purge ...”

“... just as the Seine in Paris divided the Left Bank from the Right. When the rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale launched their war of independence in November 1954, France referred to them as hors-la-loi, outlaws rather than combatants. By the time Algeria won its independence in July 1962, hundreds of thousands of Algerians, and roughly 24,000 ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s thousand-page book is geared to the present age of long print runs and mass marketing. It is one of the currently popular narrative histories written by Britons who position themselves mid-Atlantic, in order to address the American reader. At a thousand pages Johnson’s book is longer than Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989 ...”

“... to Architecture Forum, agreed that he was a preternaturally gifted and dedicated public servant, a man above politics, above graft and greed, committed to Getting Things Done quickly and efficiently. And the things themselves – the parks, playgrounds and beaches, the bridges and parkways and expressways – either epitomised the grandeur of American ...”

“... the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characters associated with the name of J.-B. P.A. de Monet, le Chevalier de Lamarck, on the one hand, and the farrago of sillinesses that may be compendiously called ‘the IQ nonsense’, on the other. Consider Lamarckism first. One kind of Lamarckian inheritance is so ...”

“... or borrowing as the case might be. When The Closing of the American Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to ...”

“... Lawrence was Machiavel, not derelict: it was a far cry from the abandoned and self-abandoned Paul Morel at the end of Sons and Lovers; and yet Sons and Lovers in its present form would never have existed if it had not been for Frieda, her new perspective upon writing – Lawrence worked on it as he awaited the outcome of the power struggle – and the ...”

“... people who found them baffling and chaotic. ‘Jackson broke the ice.’ The phrase attributed to de Kooning has been repeated so many times that it has come to sound like the title of a historic event like the Boston Tea Party or the Relief of Mafeking. Within a short time the breach had become a flood. The phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism, New York ...”

“... the victim, and was roughly proportional to the surface area of the body. The pressure at which a man had a 50-50 chance of being killed turned out to be 500 lb per square inch, ten times higher than previously thought. Zuckerman and his unit then began to look at injuries from high-velocity weapons and shrapnel fragments. These, too, presented puzzles. One ...”