“... was more than just a tyrannical thug. He could be self-deprecatingly humorous, and was deeply read in Arab and foreign literature (Hemingway was a favourite). Once, catching a TV presenter in a grammatical error, he phoned the minister of culture to complain, decreeing a six-month suspension for the offender. His own literary efforts occupied an ...”

“... now. So you’ve revived him.TP: Well there we are then. Cheers. [glasses clink]GP: No one would read Mallock now if it wasn’t for A Humument.TP: Well, he [Mallock] did write a book that is still respected in philosophical circles. But as a novel … he’s not a bad writer. There’s not much in his life, so to speak, that has gristle and muscle. In the ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... them where appropriate. It is one of the finest works of philosophical scholarship I have ever read. The period of Russell’s thought covered by Griffin has been ill served by commentators, not least Russell himself, who dismissed his work from this period briskly and unfairly in My Philosophical Development: he describes his fellowship dissertation of ...”

“... books. Among these embattled mega-opuses, with their Faustian intellectual imperialism, are Richard Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903, briefly mentioned by Gay), Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the 19th Century (1906), Spengler’s Decline of the west(1918and 1922), Ludwig Klages’s Spirit as Adversary of the Soul (1929-1933) and ...”

“... Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her possession but kept them hidden. She denied this to me, to Susan Weissman and even to Serge’s ...”

“... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that ...”

“... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... Adele, the heroine’s mother. Every American woman may have her own story, but all children who read can use the myth of a mother both vital and wrong. As with her use of the movement to the West, one feels that Mona Simpson’s drawing of Adele, her giving her lines like ‘I’m part of all that went before and all that went after me’ (curiously related ...”

“... There is​ no sign that Freud read Jane Austen. Yet in her use of the words ‘unconscious’ and ‘unconsciously’, Austen might have had some claim to his attention. The words had been around in English since the late 17th century, and when Austen first uses one of them, in Sense and Sensibility, it is in a conventional and wholly un-Freudian manner ...”

“... herself in her poem ‘Homesickness’). This is the first biography written by someone who cannot read Tsvetaeva’s poetry in the original and had to have the sources on the poet translated for her. Elaine Feinstein has been carrying the Tsvetaeva torch in the English-speaking countries for about two decades. Her volume of Tsvetaeva’s poetry in ...”

“... birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in ...”

“... apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was what went on in Cambridge. Ayer read Wittgenstein when hardly anybody else in Oxford thought of doing so. But at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and instead went to Vienna to work with Moritz Schlick – this at a time when hardly anybody ...”

“... of clippings’. The ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ can best be read as the jottings of a Jewish communist who will shortly swallow a massive dose of morphine rather than fall into the hands of the Nazis. The fragmentary structure of the text reflects the ruined history from which it arises. All this brings to mind the ...”

“... long before the growth in autobiography, the popularity of the Bildungsroman encouraged people to read novels as realistic narratives which must have drawn on their authors’ lives; Jane Eyre, subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, is one example, David Copperfield another. The Brontës tried to conceal their identities behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and ...”