“... or just a Post-Modern romparama of the sort Umberto Eco managed so elegantly in The Name of the Rose. It’s much more densely webbed with allusiveness. And its mood is far more rigorously subjunctive: it’s an open network of potentialities, like a mutating spreadsheet or grid. It is all these things because it is at bottom a historical novel, and one ...”

“... in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist ...”

“... based on fleeting shared interests, and fighting against enemies from their own faiths.Rodrigo rose to prominence as an uncommonly skilled warrior in the court of Sancho II of Castile, where he was head of the king’s personal retinue. After Sancho’s sudden death, he entered the service of the late king’s brother Alfonso VI, ruler of the now enlarged ...”

“... empires came and went, that other schemes of control were devised and failed, that other peoples rose up, rid themselves of foreign rulers, and brought in regimes that were sometimes worse but often a good deal better than their predecessors – all this seems scarcely to have mattered in the calculations of Reagan and his Administration. Just as important ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... a few years of comparative cool, the temperature of the debate between Klein and her opponents rose sharply when, in about 1933, her own daughter Melitta was elected to full membership of the British Psycho-Analytical Association. Relations between the two had been strained for some years, but now an open war erupted. Melitta (backed by Edward Glover, her ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... bed and a bookcase, I would sit on the wooden desk chair and Igor on the bed, a Soviet divan that rose up alarmingly in the middle and looked extremely uncomfortable. After a few years, Irina decided that this flat was impossibly difficult for Raisa, and found them another one nearby with two bigger rooms plus kitchen and bathroom. It was almost opposite the ...”

“... had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her ...”

“... transformed into an oak, a latter-day English Daphne. A few years later, Dryden wrote a letter to Richard Busby, his sons’ headmaster at Westminster, appealing against the rustication of one of them for some misdemeanour. He sugared the protest like this: ‘None complaine, but they desire to be reconcild at the same time: there is no mild Expostulation at ...”

“... infinite length; the next moment, the leg was minuscule, and the ground under my nose. The ground rose, retreated, tilted, torqued. Perceptual illusions succeeded one another at the rate of five or six a second. I thought of Hume – ‘we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable ...”

“... the Committee’s press conference, when an editor of the official historical journal of the CPSU rose to enquire angrily what right Yanayev had as a member of the Politburo to participate in the unconstitutional takeover, to which the hangdog pretender replied that a Party historian should know that he was not a member of the Politburo. In fact, no one from ...”

“... Young Dead’ and Picasso’s travelling artistes, ‘the Saltimbanques’, of the Elegies; ‘the Rose’, which has its place in his poetry at all times; and ‘the poem’ (‘Gedicht’, ‘Gesang’, ‘Rühmen’) as a vessel and emblem of the creative impulse. These mythic creations culminate in the tenth and last Elegy, in which the figure of ...”

“... professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to ...”