“... thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All.’ In 1938, A.L. Rowse, who knew him at All Souls, went further, pillorying Lothian as ‘Britain’s public enemy ...”

“... reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain ...”

“... chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a grammar school, which meant gathering a larger number of boys and making them sit still for even longer periods of time. When archaeologists excavated ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... crisis in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, especially when the Carolingian heir was too young to lead an army, some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the ...”

“... was, after all, the time when the middle-aged men and women who colour British public opinion were young, hopeful and sexually active. Is it the decade that they now mourn and celebrate, or the charm of their lost young selves? Sara Maitland writes that this book began as a response to the mockery of her daughter’s ...”

“... Robert Chandler writes: ‘Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia that we have or are ever likely to have.’ Chandler, who has had the herculean task of making a good translation of this long, moving and very remarkable novel, puts forward that claim in his Introduction ...”

“... to think again about her work, since she’s nowadays best remembered as the first wife of Robert Lowell, the one whom he drove, while drunk, into a brick wall. The crash necessitated months of excruciatingly painful surgery (recounted in her story ‘The Interior Castle’) and caused – as one male friend helpfully computed – a ‘25 per cent ...”

“... he staged his paintings. ‘We were surprised to learn that his suicide was so ritualistic,’ Robert Motherwell said. For me, and I imagine for many others then as now, Rothko just was his paintings – paintings that seemed, when we stood before them spellbound, to be our shifting moods themselves. It is with some trepidation that one opens a new ...”

“... and you can see smoke from blazes far back in the wilderness. There Norman Maclean as a boy and young man learned from his father, a Presbyterian minister, about rectitude, pride, hard work, the doctrine of grace and the art of fly-fishing. He hiked, camped and hunted in the mountains, fished in the rivers. At 15 he began to work for the Forest Service ...”

“... to be past child-bearing age. Focus of Isabel’s attention, however, is the Splendid Young Man (a further Dickensian chime) whose blond curls and red socks send tremors of passion through his seminar students. Her fond hopes of being swept off her feet are scuppered when her flatmate Pol, a large and louche woman, sweeps the Splendid ...”

“... this persuasion she did nothing to controvert – so that when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not ...”

“... tough kid from a miserable background turns into a brooding, diffident, egotistical, elusive young man with a good profile, a honking adolescent’s voice not unlike Truffaut’s, and a succession of delicious girls. So, for some of us at least, the charm wears thin – or rather, it changes its nature. ‘Scapegrace’ may still be the word: as a ...”

“... poppers, hooks, studs, laces, toggles, drawstrings, safety-pins and even old-time fibulae? But, as Robert Friedel shows, the passion for novelty has become the real mother of invention; necessity rarely enters into it. Today the greatness of a nation is measured by the aggregated lengths of zipper to be found in its people’s wardrobes. The zipper has ceased ...”

“... book at a fair price has taken eight years to cross the Atlantic.) Mr Olney, like but unlike Robert Carrier, is an American who has exported himself to countries where there is no damned nonsense about democracy in matters cultural. He is a cook and a teacher of cookery who commutes between Provence and London, and he takes his craft with intense ...”