“... letters – which have some of the combative quality of his table talk. But he was a difficult man, in whose life protective colouring and character are hard to distinguish. In a notebook he kept in his twenties he wrote: ‘The heart is an instrument which rusts if it is not used. Without a heart can one be an artist?’ Some who knew him were persuaded ...”

“... zone appeared’. The day before, Carlos Maluje Contreras, a member of the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh), had been arrested. He was interrogated and tortured through the night. He told his captors that he had arranged a rendezvous with another communist for the following day; if they let him keep it they could make a further arrest. Once alone on the ...”

“... that while its secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and its foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, would meet the vice president, they wished to distance themselves from his views. What followed, according to the official Vatican statement, was ‘an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by ...”

“... Front. The Congress of Tours was to launch (though outside the old confines of his party) a man who bravely denounced what was in effect a totalitarian takeover of French Socialism. He was one of the first to understand the extraordinary consistency of the Soviet system which gave the French ‘comrades’ no alternative but to submit or to break ...”

“... In the years before 1914, the open lectures that Henri Bergson gave at the Collège de France were the prototype in intellectual chic for the barnstorming Parisian ‘seminars’ of Jacques Lacan in the Sixties and Seventies, even if the topics that the fashionable came to hear were as dry as the lecturer’s podium manner: ‘The Evolution of Theories of Memory’, ‘Theories of the Will’, ‘The Nature of Mind and Its Relation to Cerebral Activity ...”

“... Zola, writing under a pseudonym, hailed the 25-year-old artist, whom he had yet to meet, as ‘a man in a crowd of eunuchs’. The liberal critic Théophile Thoré (then publishing as William Bürger) contributed to the buzz by reporting that the entire canvas had taken only four days. That wasn’t true; but, like another of his claims for the picture, it ...”

“... were demons, casting Europe into perdition. Thus the fiery gospel of the abbé Barruel and Joseph de Maistre, to which reactionary Catholics and many others held fast throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. For two hundred years, these popular images of the Enlightenment have retained considerable force. Textbooks (including Colin Jones’s superb ...”

“... the poet in him. He ran off and joined the army in 1948; the following year, he eloped with Niki de Saint Phalle, another refugee from the Upper East Side. He returned to university in 1950, this time to Harvard, to complete a degree in music. In 1952, he moved to France with his wife and their infant daughter, Laura.Paris was where Mathews met John ...”

“... all of the books are well worth a first read or a return. The Open Road and Ennemonde are tours de force in their own fashion, and A King Alone is a classic by any standard. A King Alone is the earliest of these three books, first published in France (the place that doesn’t exist) in 1947. The psychological climate of the recent war is everywhere in ...”

“... her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her posthumous works, and then by Kegan Paul in 1879. Ingpen wrote of her life and sufferings tenderly: ‘Pathetic and lonely, she stands out in the faint mists of the past, a woman that will continue to evoke sympathy when her books are no longer read.’ Evidently he had no doubt of their ceasing to ...”

“... he was careful to keep them well apart. Nothing Wilde wrote is directly autobiographical except De Profundis. Gide, on the other hand, published his indiscreet journals in instalments throughout his long life, brought out his tell-all autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, in 1926, and left a short confession about his marriage, Et nunc manet in te, which he ...”

“... of the last three years’, but also elicited the first of several fine appreciations from Walter de la Mare, who was not only aware of Eastaway’s real identity, but knew of his death just three weeks earlier. De la Mare described the poems as ‘final and isolated’, while also pinpointing ‘a kind of endlessness in ...”

“... child’s confession. Probably the first of these to appear was The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554. Lazarillo is an orphan boy who faces starvation in the hard streets of Salamanca. His first master, a blind man, beats him and wrenches open his jaws to smell whether he has eaten the last piece of ...”

“... on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit missionary, but behaved in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was committed to an asylum. In 1726 he was shipped back home ...”