“... began life in Enzensberger’s Berlin apartment. Its members included his ex-wife, Dagrun, his young daughter and his brother Ulrich. It’s hard to imagine a more impeccably radical pedigree. Fast forward 40 years, and what we have looks like a journey from left to right. The critic of the Vietnam War has witnessed the Khmer Rouge and become a critic of ...”

“... discarded. Guthrie, like, say, Balzac, Simenon, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Dylan, Richmal Crompton and Stephen King, was basically a writing machine, someone constantly in the process of noting, notating and composing. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912, Guthrie was brought up in Texas, then lived in California, New York and Florida, but he didn’t really belong ...”

“... curtly dismissed by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that Wright, having edited ...”

“... Geoffroy’s enthusiasm for transformationism – as evolution was known in those days – was, in Stephen Jay Gould’s accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound ...”

“... The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated joys. Lehmann, who published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to sensational acclaim in 1927, smoked, danced and divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a ...”

“... metaphor of pharmacological magic, of revitalising the self through its energy. Hélène Smith, a young Genevan medium who starred in Dr Théodore Flournoy’s bestseller From India to the Planet Mars (1899),4 spoke in many tongues, including Martian. Her multiple selves included Marie Antoinette, a 15th-century Hindu princess called Simandini, and a ...”

“... from his beloved Admiralty. Tomalin’s Pepys is a more domestic man than the coarse careerist of Stephen Coote’s recent biography, or the sensitive but work-obsessed administrator who figures in Richard Ollard’s excellent but now rather elderly Life. Tomalin cannot compete with Ollard’s lovingly detailed understanding of Pepys’s work as a Naval ...”

“... 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 ...”