“... was supported by Tailyour family connections determined to use their influence on behalf of the young man. His African ancestry had to be explicitly denied. Once in India James’s letters reveal the extent to which he had adopted a white colonial identity: he gives hostile accounts of the Indian ‘natives’ and complains bitterly about lack of ...”

“... history of Dorset’s birds. Of the other characters involved, the Earl of Ilchester was Henry Stephen Fox-Strangways (1787-1858), who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St Vincent ...”

“... his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of ...”

“... as we speak. This kind of sententious assurance comes easily to him, it always has, even from a young age his sense of spiritual authority was insufferable.’ Isn’t it the adjective that is insufferable? There’s no one inside the book to pronounce such a verdict, and any number of slyer, more smoothly flowing alternatives could have been used.Galgut ...”

“... read to him from birth; but they only really sounded like Thomas. And, unusually for an ambitious young poet of the time, Thomas was not trying too hard to be original: there just seemed to be something he could do with words that no one else could do. He was, in that sense, tailor-made for the romantic myth of the poet as self-fashioned ...”

“... journal Our Time, and Geoffrey Matthews, later a Shelley scholar. When they tried to join the Young Communist League their letters were intercepted and the police summoned to interview them in the head’s study. The Thompsons’ neighbours in Boars Hill, the Carritts, had seven children and when one of the daughters died, the five brothers and their ...”

“... electrical engineer with a talent for management and business. Malachowsky and Priem, according to Stephen Witt’s Thinking Machine, had complementary skills – they were, respectively, an architect and a chip mechanic. They wanted to make a new kind of chip, optimised for a rapidly growing sector: video games. Their employer, the large chip company LSI ...”

“... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...”

“... and Gwen Williams’s cottage, where Raymond grew up. Assembled in the churchyard, ‘Raymond’s young men’ (as his wife, Joy, used to call them) are now middle-aged and showing signs of wear and tear, ‘thinning and unkempt hair ... a bad back here, a heavy paunch there’. Sartorially, they are drabbies, ‘awful old grey suits and worse black ties ...”

“... the many levels of darkness and violence in this ‘home’. In the meantime, though, he was a young writer in Dublin, gleefully attacking his elders. On Seán Ó Faoláin: ‘I have had no contact with him except through his work and it has always seemed phoney to me.’ On the novelist Kate O’Brien: ‘I find literary people bore me to almost the point ...”

“... supposed failure to mourn. Atlas writes: ‘Failed my mother!’ cries Louie … confessing to his young son the shabby sexual adventure that he engaged in as she lay on her deathbed: ‘That may mean, will mean, little or nothing to you, my only child, reading this document.’ To Bellow, it meant everything. Again, the stylistic equivalent of an operatic ...”

“... at other times a lot. The mother is English, or Italian, or American. She’s a child, a dashing young woman, a shrunken ghoul. The father is German, the father is English, the father is dead, or barely there. Childhood happens in Jewish Berlin or Catholic Baden; adolescence is mostly in Sanary, and can look stiff and weirdly proportioned when done in the ...”

“... ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He recommended the young and unpublished Patricia Highsmith to Yaddo in 1948. In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in ...”

“... Rossman that peasants and workers did not sit quietly and take whatever the regime dished out. Stephen Kotkin, on the other hand, was struck by how little resistance there was, and shows that Soviet citizens (like most people in most countries) simply accepted and accommodated to the prevailing system. Influenced by Foucault, he describes the Soviet people ...”

“... views is also misleading. In a powerful and ingenious essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets’, Stephen Greenblatt shows that even an idea as apparently subversive as the ‘atheism’ of the Renaissance – the Machiavellian notion that religion was an instrument of political domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a ...”