“... by that old stand-by called, ‘ambivalence’; a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he ...”

“... an itinerant singer whom he had invited into his hotel for a drink. The waiters sneered at the man and put the couple in a room by themselves, away from the hotel guests. Earlier, Tolstoy had been incensed by the fact that the public had listened to the singing, but then turned away without giving the performer any money. The singer himself proved to be ...”

“... replying in 1915 to a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, was ‘unaware that he was writing to a dead man’. It’s a true statement – if Einstein had known he was writing to a dead man he would presumably have stopped – but the piquant hint of mystery is misleading. Schwarzschild was commanding an artillery unit on the ...”

“... They steep us in the decors of revivalism, from the marmoreal bondieuseries of Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche to the pity-inducing poor folk engraved by Gustave Doré. Sustained by these and by the louring atmospheric landscapes of the Hague School – Goupil & Co’s version of ‘modern painting’ – van Gogh forged himself a personal ...”

“... and Churchill at the Anfa Conference in Casablanca; in 1945, aged fifteen, he was decorated by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had high hopes that he would manage its postcolonial interests in the Maghreb – he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been ...”

“... or adopts an idiom that might have been drawn from Vogue (fog a ‘fishnet plissé’ or ‘peau de soie’, the sea ‘velouté’ or ‘suede’), she rightly prefers the term ‘outdoorsydomestic’, which nicely catches her trick of presenting the great outdoors in indoor terms. In ‘The Cove’, for example, we see her looking out at the eiders, trig ...”

“... 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 ...”