“... identified as ‘a philosopher, the brother of the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein’. Robert Musil occupies the summit of Canetti’s esteem until he is demoted after a show of petulance at a tactless mention of his archrival Thomas Mann. Herman Broch was Canetti’s great friend at the beginning of the period but fades out of the narrative as it ...”

“... some spontaneous emotional and intellectual reaction that has been only partly processed by self-conscious rationalisation. As Gran himself comments, with the passage of time ‘the memory of the hardship fades to leave the adventure bright and clear.’ A good diary should offer more than just ‘the adventure bright and clear’. One reason for ...”

“... are to a large extent guesswork – apart from anything else, levels of alcohol consumption are self-reporting, so accurate figures for usage are hard to come by, especially among heavy drinkers with fucked-up health. In any case, doctors don’t believe what patients tell them about their boozing habits. The spiky British wine writer Andrew Barr told his ...”

“... richer, more intimate affair than, say, proportional representation; but the post-colonial critic Robert Young has recently reminded us of just what racist, imperial baggage this apparently suggestive notion carries with it from the anthropologising 19th century. Jacqueline Rose has her own suspicions of that brand of literary politics for which culture is ...”

“... place the day after the French defeat at Sedan. Marcel was born ten months later, on 10 July 1871. Robert, the brother famously absent from almost everything Proust wrote, was born when Marcel was not quite two. What is striking in this as in other accounts of the Proust household is the extent to which the boys seemed to belong to two entirely separate ...”

“... of his run of success in the Ottercove world of society and journalism. While Waugh settled into a self-created world of Catholicism as a mock-aristocratic patriarch, Gerhardie remained an indeterminate sort of adventurer to the end, dying in 1977 at the age of 82 in his little flat near the BBC, for whom he had worked in the war years. For a long time he had ...”

“... and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon Millan’s ...”

“... Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack Benny. They were in court less because of Hauptmann than because of Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity of them all. It is a sign of the passing of time that on the dustjacket of this book the name of ...”

“... was 16, to enrol at Duke University as a ‘desperately poor’ undergraduate, ‘romantically and self-indulgently lonely’. He graduated at the top of his class and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, graduating with a B.Litt, after writing the university’s first thesis on Joyce. When Kenner wrote to him in 1958 he was finishing a Harvard PhD on ...”

“... was sparse (it ended at 15, if it ever really began), but he was a furious reader. He was always self-conscious about his peasant origins, and tried to drown them out with a noisy extravagance of opinion, and by proclaiming a Nietzschean aristocracy of spirit. From adolescence, he was obsessively determined to become a great writer; his late teens and ...”

“... England’s shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was still engaged in forging itself – as, indeed, it still is – and novelists saw themselves as the chief chroniclers of that process, in full ...”

“... are plain-living, selfless and even saintly, while others are envious, untrustworthy and self-seeking. Some anti-egalitarians are greedy, complacent and callous, while others are open-handed, fair-minded and genuinely committed to the well-being of their dependants and subordinates. But that commonplace observation is no help in the quest for a ...”

“... is useful to contextualise him. Stephen Calloway does this with deft authority in his essay ‘The Self-Fashioning of an Artist’. It’s in his milieu, the fluid fin-de-siècle of the 1890s, that Nicholson comes into focus as a personality and an artist. With Max Beerbohm, Edwin Lutyens (a close friend who was responsible for Nicholson’s trip to ...”

“... with a powerful sense of historical destiny. John Lydgate’s Troy Book provided the defining self-image for Henry’s regime: the British, like the Romans, were refugees from the ruins of Troy and now, like the Romans, they would conquer an empire. This confident sense of imperial mission faded as victory turned to stalemate, but the classical idiom that ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”