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“... new team have forced the departure of one of its political columnists, the deputy-editor, Hugo Young – a writer any newspaper might be glad to employ. As to what is happening at the Times – well, reading tastes differ: but who could ever have imagined that the Thunderer would seek to entice readers by conducting an up-market bingo game which ...”

“... schooldays. He was four years below me, notorious as soon as he arrived, because he never seemed young. He wandered around the school gazing blandly at people through his windscreen spectacles and clutching a gigantic briefcase, in which, it was rumoured, resided his ‘stocks and shares’. He was one of those boys – already playing the markets at 13. But ...”

“... Paris regularly spawns: Hemingway at the Ritz bar, Sartre at the Deux Magots, Balzac and Victor Hugo practically everywhere – here we go again. It’s partly that the Francophile tends not to absorb Paris in a head-on fashion. Instead, it comes at us constantly through novels, paintings, opera, cinema, chansons, popular mythology – and, mainly, through ...”

“... literary theorist Paul de Man. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing. The protagonist, Louis Seynaeve, who is ten years old at the time of Munich, grows ...”

“... Kingsman, J.M. Keynes – died in Rome in 1923 at the age of 86, having extracted from a nephew, Hugo Wortham, a promise to undertake his biography, and in return making Wortham his heir and literary executor. The biography, which appeared in 1927, earned a good deal of informed approbation. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who as an undergraduate had been much ...”

“... from Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze ...”

“... the sound, simple-minded story that it should have been for a Combray bedtime book, since the young hero, a foundling, or champi in the local patois, comes in the end to marry the same village woman who has brought him up. The narrator’s mother in Proust leaves the love bits out, in case her cosseted boy isn’t yet ready for them, but given that the ...”

“... In Venezuela at the end of June, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Diego Maradona, three heroes of the people in Latin America, kicked off the Copa América. Morales, pleased with his dribbling, kept possession for rather longer than might have been thought polite. When he passed, Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on to the feet of the Hand of God ...”

“... and the eyes, which Nadar called ‘two drops of coffee’, betraying some vulnerability. Victor Hugo, side-on, avuncular, or on his deathbed; a glacial Eugène Delacroix; the incredibly joyless Goncourt brothers; a series of portraits of George Sand, who went to Nadar in desperation after a competitor had captured with great vividness her drooping mouth and ...”

“... offers a panoramic view of Johannesburg, where an ape-like animal is at large in the suburbs. Young Stanley snaps it with his camera, a barmitzvah present. The picture is printed in a newspaper; an elderly estate agent’s wife welcomes the headlines as a distraction from worse horrors. Doctors at the golf club are convinced it is a baboon. It startles a ...”

“... those who endure? Tomlinson’s ‘Up at La Serra’ dramatises the restricting circumstances of a young Italian poet called Paolo Bertolani,                 who had no more to offer than a sheaf of verse          in the style of Quasimodo. Bertolani has since achieved a style of his own; his most recent volume, Seina, is written in ...”

“... in the novel: although the Enemy is repelled, the first attack on New York seriously wounds the young man, and the city sequesters him away in the bowels of the subway system to recuperate. The birth of the city hasn’t gone according to plan, and as the Enemy regroups, New York respawns fivefold into new avatars, one for each borough. Their task is to ...”

“... of which later generations will lose the secret. The Manarrs have two children, Helena and Hugo. Helena marries Peter Koenig, son of the formidable Grandmother Koenig, who lives enshrined with her ancient German maid among massive furniture. Angel is Helena and Peter’s only child, a bespectacled little girl who has to endure the ordeal of solitary ...”

“... a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her scrambles up the pyramids with another; the North African desert; Alexandria, Luxor, Damascus. The series, combined with some well-timed ...”

“... His daughter, Geneviève, remembered her father once saying that it had been easier for Victor Hugo, since he was at least able to write about his daughter’s death: ‘Hugo . . . is fortunate to have been able to speak, for me it is impossible.’ Mallarmé is a poet associated with silence, though rarely with the ...”