“... for birds and nature, and for Loriod, his wife and musical collaborator.Olivier​ Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a poet. He spent his early years in Grenoble before moving with his family to Paris in 1919, when his father, Pierre, was hired to run a lycée in the Marais. The ...”

“... Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full ...”

“... 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after ...”

“... men. One of them seemed to carry an individuality in his face, a vision that seemed bereft of easy hope or compositional completion, but carried with it a sort of implacability, a stubbornness, a power which came from knowledge and a sense, written into every inch of his face, that he was someone who would not take orders easily or go looking for ...”

“... trees shedding their bark. I had seen a photo of the Red Army marching down Richelieu Street in Charles King’s book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. It is 1944 and the opera house is in the background, more or less intact. The port appears behind it. From the top of the Potemkin steps you can see ships lined up to receive timber, coal, iron ...”

“... of responding to an economic downturn beyond cutting spending and raising interest rates in the hope that prices and wages would drop so low that the economy would right itself. Populations simply had to ride out periods of deflation and mass unemployment, as the state couldn’t do much to help them: pursuing expansionary fiscal or monetary measures (what ...”

“... makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ‘prince of light and hope’ and the ‘only adult in the room’, who tried to keep things ‘on the sunny side of the street’. The New York Times even endorsed him as the Republican candidate, despite a long anti-union, anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, anti-mass ...”

“... everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from Bukowski’s poem ‘Nirvana’.) It was in Portland that he met his first ...”

“... offer of a column on the Telegraph when he was proprietor. This was naturally embarrassing for Charles Moore, the editor, and annoying for the rest of the staff or, as Amiel puts it, a ‘small but vocal-in-corners group’ of them. Amiel sought the advice of William (Bill) Deedes, a former editor, a ‘seminal figure at the paper’ and all-round ...”

“... orator in Europe, and see him talk with his fingers,’ Talleyrand may have said: he was with Charles Fox and his deaf son, then at school in Hackney, a spin-off from Edinburgh. In the medium term Leipzig had the greatest influence, for it and the later German establishments became the home of the ‘pure’ oral method. In 1880, at a world congress in ...”

“... the strike. Pulling his many strings – among them Routledge’s editor at the Times, the late Charles Douglas-Home – he got commissions for articles about the coalfields which he wrote while engaged on reconnaissance missions. Hart spotted, and helped to sponsor, the rebels and working miners; he organised secret meetings, held MacGregor’s hand when ...”

“... discovery led Enrico Fermi in Rome to irradiate many different elements with neutrons in the hope that absorption of neutrons by their atomic nuclei would generate new radioactive elements. On irradiating the heaviest known elements, uranium and thorium, Fermi did indeed find radioactivities not ascribable to any known elements; he attributed some of ...”

“... in the physiognomies of the insane – although, as Janet Browne points out in her account of Charles Darwin’s encounter with this approach, it seems that what the psychiatrist could see in the photographs of madmen was simply not visible to the layman.) This separation means that even if we acknowledge the objectivity of a natural history of ...”

“... or dismissed as merely imaginary. The sincere man, the honest consciousness, had a reasonable hope of grasping it at last. But now Trilling finds himself confronted with a literature and a culture in which sincerity and the honest consciousness are only impotent survivals; and he comes to terms with that state of affairs in his last and finest ...”

“... in the same guileless way: undergraduate poets asked round to read him their verse in the hope that one thing might lead to another. However, on the day appointed it was not Miller who turned up but Kallman. Isherwood was in the next room when Auden came through and said: ‘It’s the wrong blond.’ The rest is history. Or literature. Or the history ...”