“... now they are all one family. ‘I am a biological mother to one, a stepmother to the other, and a de facto mother in general to both of them.’ The characters don’t have names. Interspersed with this story are excerpts from a fictional book the adult narrator has brought along to read on the trip. It is called Lost Children Elegies and is written by an ...”

“... who passed from a hardscrabble youth through the halls of the meritocracy to become a rich man on the earnings of his fiction. Note the defensive modesty of the epitaph Updike suggested for himself: ‘Here lies a small-town boy who tried to make the most out of what he had, who made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.’ The ...”

“... Joyce turns Carroll into a minor avatar of his dodgy hero, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a man more sinned against than sinning surely, but also a little closer to sin than he will ever admit. That’s what the fall’s all about, we might say, whether it’s Humpty Dumpty’s (the figure from the nursery rhyme, not the philosopher of Through the ...”

“... owned by the Chinese company Dalian Wanda, whose founder, Wang Jianlin, is the richest man in China, indeed in the whole of Asia. One Nine Elms is their first property in Europe. The building will feature two huge towers, and will loom over the other tall buildings in its penumbra. This new area is, in planner-speak, known as VNEB, for Vauxhall ...”

“... would be a better response to the current situation than monetary tightening (‘truly stupid’, Paul Krugman called her position on Twitter, before deleting the tweet and apologising). Weber’s argument, supported since with empirical analysis, was that profits were responsible for rising prices, not wages. In politically sensitive areas such as ...”

“... for complete independence rather than membership of the Franco-African ‘community’ proposed by de Gaulle. By 1960 the others had signed up to his vision: independence in name – and eventually membership of international bodies such as the UN and the Organisation of African Unity – but always in the shadow of the former metropole. A dozen former French ...”

“... Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly grossness of Merrymakers at Shrovetide plunges us straight into the world of the plays themselves. The analogy is suggested by Taylor in an ...”

“... derives from not being able to sit alone in a quiet room. When the Savoyard aristocrat Xavier De Maistre was sentenced to six weeks’ house arrest for duelling in 1790, he turned his detention into a grand imaginary voyage. ‘My room is situated on the 45th degree of latitude,’ he records in A Journey around my Room. ‘It stretches from east to ...”

“... in intensity and in imaginative sympathy Clark’s account of Manet’s Exposition Universelle de 1867: The sketch may be improbably big and overfull of matter, but it pretends all the same to be not quite a picture, not quite finished. The paint is put on in discriminate, sparse patches which show off their abbreviation – puffs of smoke eat into the ...”

“... as a ‘model case’ member of the liberal elite (in a non-pejorative sense of the term), a man whose moral, intellectual and cultural passions drove him to rethink the basic principles of economic policy. The paradigm that succeeded Keynesianism was scarcely less scholarly in its provenance. Many of the intellectuals who forged the political economy of ...”

“... of his own intended, the much more docile Edith. A startled Sara was introduced to her new young man as he returned, bedraggled and sunburned, from the tour of Wales – ‘a dreadful figure’, as she remembered, though admittedly ‘eloquent and clever’. And so Coleridge abandoned Cambridge and Southey Oxford, and they moved to Bristol, Southey’s ...”

“... studies. Six years later she published Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the ...”

“... a silver wire laid down along the bulwarks’ which he ‘thought was never going to break’. The man ‘who had nearly paid with his life for this little bit of useless information’, and whom the journalist-narrator had gone half-way round the world to interview, was, naturally enough, Kipling himself. In Something of Myself he remarks that he once had the ...”

“... offered like a boastful list of ‘previous’, is fulsome but inaccurate. Jack Spot: Man of a Thousand Cuts was not published by the Olympia Press but by Alexander Moring. The ghost’s nom de guerre is Hank Janson, not ‘Jansen’. The index is also dodgy (as I discovered by trying to check on George ...”

“... from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century. Jacques Attali’s book is another remarkable signpost on the same new landscape. The author isn’t a ...”