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“... exceptions, no crossovers, no poets who manage to be both with and without history? There is one: Alexander Blok, ‘a pure lyricist who did have development and history and a path’. But then Tsvetaeva corrects herself almost immediately. ‘Development’ is not the word she wants. ‘Development presupposes harmony. Can there be a development which is ...”

“... wrote of ‘Montessori fever’. In Washington, she visited a Montessori school established by Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel. In New York, she gave a lecture at Carnegie Hall, which sold out; a thousand people stood outside in the street to see her. She was introduced by the philosopher John Dewey. ‘The development at which I aim includes the ...”

“... writing that. But they all came from different rungs of the social ladder. At the top was Lady Gregory, who had a big house and plenty of tenants; and then Synge, who had a small private income, as Beckett and Wilde did, and a memory of glory; and then Yeats, who worked all his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and ...”

“... What they need at this point, I thought, was not theosophy but the Federalist Papers – which Gregory Freidin of Stanford is just now translating into Russian. As we left the church and resumed our walk, Misha started in again about the Jews and their pursuit of ‘economical advancement’. They knew no more of Judaism, he said, than he did of ...”

“... Being Earnest was to open on 14 February. Wilde attended rehearsals, and was persuaded by George Alexander, the actor-manager, who was producing the play and performing in it, to drop the act in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. This play, too, was a huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times ...”

“... to be a man of images. (In a story called ‘Line and Colour’, Babel contrasts the idealism of Alexander Kerensky, who refuses to wear glasses because he prefers colour to line, to the hardheadedness of Trotsky, who never takes his glasses off for a minute: colour is always an expensive commodity.) The Jewish American creators of the early superhero comics ...”

“... was an important source for his literary work. ‘Double bind’ is a dubious idea borrowed from Gregory Bateson, who in 1956 proposed that ‘paradoxical communications’ – when, for example, a mother on whom a child is wholly dependent offers food or comfort and at the same time gives signs of refusing it – cause schizophrenia. The popular press took ...”

“... down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his 16 ...”