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“... harbingers of a slide to nothingness, not marks of a transcendence to come. To grow old, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser extent, what they have been, though past achievements ...”

“... and uncounted lions and leopards’. Cicero protested: ‘What pleasure can a cultivated man find seeing a noble beast run through with a hunting spear?’ But his, like Plutarch’s after him, was a lone voice. A huge industry of hunters and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North ...”

“... readings in the suburbs of Algiers. He wasn’t a good communist: he’d been disabused by Retour de l’URSS, Gide’s unsparing account of socialism in one country, and didn’t share the party’s hostility to the first stirrings of nationalism in Algeria. He’d begun work on a novel and a set of essays when he was denounced as a Trotskyist and expelled ...”

“... called Gigi, and her initiation into S&M under the tutelage of her father, lover and master, a man known as the Professor. That’s a sanitised summary of the proceedings, described in meticulous prose in 239 numbered paragraphs over little more than a hundred pages. Fayard, his publisher, was worried enough to have the book wrapped in plastic with an ...”

“... in 1597, the legend of Orpheus is made the occasion for extensive satire on women; Bacon’s De Sapienta Veterum of 1609 explains ‘it is wisely added in the story that Orpheus was averse from women and from marriage; for the sweets of marriage ... commonly draw men away from performing great and lofty services ...’; in Fletcher’s play of ...”

“... from Savile Row. Yet Savile Row dominated male fashion for more than a century, just as the rue de la Paix has dominated female fashion. Tailors have never been given the credit that has gone to couturiers. They have stayed in the shadows, sitting cross-legged or wielding their tape-measures in traditional obscurity. The story of modern male fashion – and ...”

“... administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a moustachioed ...”

“... Born of ‘an obsession to be sure that these children are not forgotten’, it is compiled by a man whose father fought for France in defence of what he believed to be its commitment to civic equality and, after the German victory, literally sacrificed himself to the SS so that his family, huddled behind a false wall, would escape discovery. The ...”

“... Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce all advocated anarchist positions, including ‘the propaganda of the deed’, aka bomb-throwing. This is one of the riddles of modernist art, and at its centre is the sphinx Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), great champion of Seurat ...”

“... same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge Luis Borges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like Seepersad Naipaul’s book, was printed privately. (Borges’s mother later told Bioy Casares ...”

“... Spradlin) appears to be more interested in lunch than in the mission he is ordering, and his aide de camp, a very youthful-looking Harrison Ford, doesn’t quite know whether to look sinister or sympathetic. He clears his throat a lot. A Vietnamese technician (Jerry Ziesmer) reverses the oriental stereotype by looking like an ordinary human being, and far ...”

“... once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that ...”

“... 1943. As Holland observes, we remember Cassino and Anzio, but not Ortona, a tragic Canadian lieu de mémoire to stand alongside Vimy Ridge from 1917.Holland meticulously stitches together stories from war diaries and operational reports, letters and journals and memoirs, swooping from the sober projections of politicians in smoke-filled rooms to the ...”

“... Rutherford was one of my early heroes, and Wilson’s biography of this great and lovable man has enlivened and enlarged, rather than debunked, my youthful image. Rutherford was the man who created the atomic age: a farmer’s boy from New Zealand whose brilliance and Herculean energy brought him the Presidency of the Royal Society, a peerage, and honours from all over the world ...”

“... intellectuals. But the towering figures among Irish writers during the long upheaval from the Fin de Siècle to the Thirties lived aside from the world of the insurrectionists. The latter were rarely writers and the books they produced are undistinguished. Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland and Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom have their ...”