“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his friends, happy to be in the company of the head of the English Catholics, a man not given to any obvious show of relaxation but, rather, seeming constantly anxious about being behind with business. Nearby is the English College, or the Venerable English College, as its fanbase likes to call it. Father Clive was waiting on the steps for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices and ...”

“... patrons. Scipione Borghese, Bernini’s first great supporter and client, persuaded his uncle Pope Paul V to make his lover Stefano Pignatelli a cardinal; and Antonio Barberini, Pope Urban VIII’s notorious nephew, was made a cardinal at the age of twenty, to howls of protest, and proceeded to populate the family palace – now famous for its collection of ...”

“... in old age to use the glasses which had been denied him earlier as ‘unsuitable for a young man’; and in Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ridiculous ...”

“... to the project ‘if they existed’. There was no genetic link between the narrator and the man he called grandfather, since the French grandmother of ‘Michael Chabon’ had already had her only child, a daughter, by the time she met her husband in America after the war. The couple seem to express between them the whole horror of Europe in the 20th ...”

“... on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former navy man, who wrote several hundred articles on Watergate for the Washington Post with his colleague Carl Bernstein. The two then wrote famous books about the fall of Nixon, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, the first made into a well-known ...”