“... gone to the gulags or Paris, and knew that I was touching holy relics. ‘Here’s Mandelshtam’s first published verse,’ Galya translated. ‘These woodcuts are by Goncharova. And look: Blok. Bely. Gumilev.’ ‘The Acmeist who married Akhmatova?’ (I was such a show-off.) ‘Yes,’ they confirmed. ‘And this is the book with the cycle of poems ...”

“... George Lyttelton died on 1 May 1962, thus ending a correspondence which had begun in 1955; the first of the volumes edited by the survivor was published in 1978, the rest have appeared at intervals since. ‘For beginners’, as Rupert Hart-Davis puts it, mindful of those who have had to pick up the thread at some intermediate stage of the ...”

“... return for his new status: a bargain he never appears to have kept. Quite when apartheid security first took an interest in Cole is hard to say. In his memoir, In the Fiery Continent (1962), Tom Hopkinson recalled that someone in the Drum darkroom had been approached to work as an informer, though he doesn’t mention Cole by name. It’s possible that ...”

“... by taking over the house and all in it. Harriet, who, in spite of her brother’s enthusiasm, at first holds aloof from the Rawul’s Transcendental Internationalism and from the movement’s founders, is eventually bowled over by wily Crishi; he takes off his pyjama trousers (Indian) on a beach at midnight, and things proceed to a natural conclusion. This ...”

“... which Billington, before finally coming clean, presents to us with remarkable coyness. We are first told that Pinter ‘began a serious extra-marital relationship that was to last for seven years’; then that he had ‘an ongoing affair with a prominent TV journalist’; then that he and Joan Bakewell were ‘close’; finally that they had ‘an ...”

“... An inexpert but frequently impressive first novel, Soor Hearts is set in Shetland in the early years of this century. Magnus Doull, having sailed before the mast for ten years, returns to the fishing village from which he had fled under suspicion of having murdered Thomas Pole. Nearly everyone believes him guilty, since the two young men had been seen to quarrel ...”

“... Are the Only People Here’. What was so powerful about this story? The subject-matter, in the first place, was irresistibly painful. It concerns a mother, never named, who finds a blood clot while changing her baby: ‘what is this thing, startling against the white diaper, like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow?’ The baby is rushed to the hospital ...”

“... views about such matters which led Ernest Gellner to persuade Khazanov to write his book in the first place. If so, it was a most rewarding initiative. I agree with Gellner ‘that it is a quite outstanding scholarly achievement,’ which will probably never again be closely matched: but I very much hope that no Anglophone anthropologist will take it as a ...”

“... its variations, one who understands humanity in some broad, if rather intuitive and dreamy way: Ruth Benedict, though her work is deeply unfashionable today, has this kind of position. Though both of these visions of the anthropologist have a certain plausibility, they hardly justify the tendency of recent biographies, particularly of Mead, to create ...”

“... woman – an intelligent and in a way successful young woman – for whom nothing quite comes off. Ruth is a student and a researcher; she says of herself that her life has been ruined by literature. But she is wrong in this: it isn’t literature that is to blame. The real diagnosis is made in an authorial comment later on. ...”

“... stood on Elizabethan maps. By 1600, ‘Thule’ could mean anywhere in the frozen north. The first writer to mention Thule was Pytheas, in the fourth century BC, for whom it was an island somewhere north of Britain. The Greek word for a written account of such a voyage as Pytheas’ was periodos, a ‘going round’. But the manifest meaning of ...”

“... does not come completely into focus until Far Away and Long Ago, which Hudson wrote during the First World War. Also new in that work, or newly emphasised, is a grotesque element, handled in a manner that has its affinities with Marquez. There are bizarre events in the natural environment: a storm of brick-shaped hailstones which kills fifty sheep and ...”

“... son Robert and his friend Tobias. Glory’s consciousness permeates Home, which is Robinson’s first third-person novel. The pathos of her situation, and the stoicism with which she faces it, are handled with a restraint that may disappoint admirers of the breathtaking lyricism of the narrative voice developed for ...”

“... the exiling in 1950 of Seretse Khama, then the heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy and eventually the first president of Botswana, for marrying a white woman; the refusal to take a tougher line against apartheid – it has been essentially vindicated by the current harmonious relationship with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book ...”

“... for Brazil, where they planned to settle after seven years of exile in England and America. At first he seems to have found the change of scene rejuvenating: he continued work on a biography of Balzac, started a new novel and a critical study of Montaigne, and finished his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, which starts in the late 19th century and ...”