“... a lightness no native painter attained.) Lucien had just suffered a cerebral haemorrhage; he was young (born in 1863) and made a recovery, but lost some use of his left leg and arm and, perhaps, some of his confidence as a painter. His concentration on book-making and engraving during the next two decades, and the retreat from avant-garde adventures (he had ...”

“... among its impeccable olde London costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic ...”

“... recurring fantasies about sleeping with the girl who comes to clean his flat, has an affair with a young woman, Elena (Daisy Granados), which would be light-hearted for Sergio if he knew how to let go of his irony, and is light-hearted for her until he ditches her. He remembers his schooldays, his first visit to a brothel, an affair with a German girl he ...”

“... and legs emerge. The impression of solidity was partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly ...”

“... curving roofs with deep eaves. In 1957 a furious gale ripped off almost fifty roofs. The young architectural critic Ian Nairn, until recently a bomber pilot in the RAF, pointed out that the geometry of the design had acted as an aerofoil (but he liked it). Brett later complained that this disaster was all anyone remembered of his architectural ...”

“... of general scientific knowledge, the cinema’s achievements reach no higher than such biopics as Young Tom Edison (1940 – one of Mickey Rooney’s less memorable efforts), Madame Curie (1943, a weepy Greer Garson vehicle) and sub-standard science fiction. What Desmond has apparently taken from Hollywood with his ‘ciné’ style of narration is a fondness ...”

“... diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion. It was an age of military dandyism like no other. Was there, then, a case for cracking down on the monstrous millinery of war? Was towering headgear really necessary to overawe the enemy? How many British ...”

“... before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful figures are pole-axed all around him because he plays the buffoon so successfully that no one can see in him a future emperor. Born in 1913, Deedes grew up in a castle that was sold off for ...”

“... In October 1920​ , Gaito Gazdanov, then a young soldier, returned to his armoured train in the Crimea to find that it had been captured by the Red Army. He escaped in November by crossing the Black Sea to Constantinople with some of his fellow soldiers. He was one of more than 150,000 refugees – the sad remains of General Wrangel’s defeated White Army, along with any civilians who managed to make it on board – on a fleet of 126 ships ...”

“... and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 1935. His childhood seems to have been appalling and he was reluctant to discuss it. He never knew his ...”

“... declaring a fervent desire to do the same thing to the Senate. The historian Cassius Dio, then a young man, was there and recalls that he and his senatorial peers were torn between laughter and terror, knowing the emperor happily murdered those who displeased him. Eventually, after 11 years of burgeoning madness, Commodus was himself murdered. The prefect of ...”

“... of fable, discreetly foreshadowed in the first pages of the book. Frédéric and a friend, when young, visited a brothel in their native town, but they were not able to enjoy its pleasures because Frédéric got scared and ran off. His friend had to leave, too, because Frédéric had the money. The last words of the novel describe a late conversation ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s​ short story ‘Bliss’ is a jewel-like study of a young woman, Bertha, poised unknowingly at a moment of crisis in her life. (It’s interesting not least for what it prefigures of Mrs Dalloway.) Bertha, preparing for a dinner party she will give that evening, arranges the fruit she has ordered: tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink ...”

“... strangers would be antiquarian: it was a relic from a time, not so long ago, when for the aspiring young the printed word, and that special kind of it called literature, was a medium not seriously challenged by any other. That time was surely gone, I thought, and printed literature now had a hard time claiming even parity with competing media like film, rock ...”

“... English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that ...”