“... 1929, when Beckett was 23, and 1940. Those years were troubled by a dilemma that threatened the young man’s mental health. Beckett’s parents had wanted him to get involved in the family quantity surveying business; instead he studied languages and in 1928 went to Paris as a young academic. It seemed a sensible ...”

“... sense, but a kind of greed. Janisch, the country policeman, is a good-looking man, not young but intensely attractive to women, and he exploits this to seduce them, usually by pulling them over on mountain roads for minor traffic offences, then propositioning them. His preferred prey are single women of a certain age, and his ostensible goal in ...”

“... and Guelma, at the cost of thousands of Algerian lives.Camus had been a communist in Algiers as a young man, but turned against it in 1939, when he wrote that the Soviet Union ‘can be classed among the countries that prey on others’. Nonetheless, he fell under the suspicion of the State Department months before his arrival in New York for ‘filing ...”

“... in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and ...”

“... concise and to the point here: The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by ...”

“... One evening last September, millions of viewers watched three young men forge a Modigliani sculpture live on Italian television. Three things distinguished the programme from other forgers’ At Homes, such as the BBC’s regular visits to the studio of Tom Keating (a sale of whose work had raised £274,000 at Christie’s that very day ...”

“... him a visibility at odds with the solitude and simplicity he craved. One reason he moved with his young family from Belfast to Glanmore in County Wicklow in 1972 was to protect himself from what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical ...”

“... in France, his French marriages and susceptibility to Gallic culture. The Scottish historian Roger Mason has said that the 1550s saw the ‘establishment of what amounted to French colonial rule in Scotland’. Hutson obscures this story with her insular narrative, yet the English and the Scots were both impelled by wider conflicts.Confessional ...”

“... loathsome to her) reptiles. Melanie was the youngest of four children, of whom two were to die young, the third child Sidonie of scrofula at the age of eight and her adored brother Emmanuel at the age of 25, of heart failure brought about by tuberculosis and drug addiction. Emmanuel appears to have fantasised for some time about such an early ...”

“... His heat and his motion. His grin and his shimmy. His robes and his finery. One side of the young Elvis was a faultlessly polite, radiantly ordinary boy next door. But he was also drawn to outrageous clothes, pimpish overload, endless resculpting of his princely hair. His everyday clothes look neither work-appropriate, nor what was then officially ...”

“... brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he ...”

“... Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and, during a brief period when she moved on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry. Butts registers their comments, advice and obiter dicta. (Plans have now been announced for a published edition of the diaries, the most important unpublished memoir of the period that I have seen.) In 1918 Butts noted: ‘What we want is a new way of ...”

“... and, when called for, abrupt’): everything – the seed of whatever I try – comes from Karel. Roger Spottiswoode (film editor and director): Some thirty years ago I found myself locked in a London cutting-room with him for several months as we edited The Gambler. One day, he took a phone call from Los Angeles. It was unusually long and when he finally ...”

“... with such inscriptions as ‘Babies’ and ‘Children’. Last week Queen Mary was here, and young Mr Blunt, who is on our staff, was presented to her, as his aunt happens to be the chief official of the Needlework Guild. By this time the idea of incorporating the institute into the University of London had been raised, and in July 1939, after the last ...”