“... was arrested for participating in the Paris Commune, and in jail became friends with a musician, Charles de Sivry, whose mother – Antoinette-Flore Mauté – was a talented pianist and teacher who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin’s (as it happened, she was also Verlaine’s mother-in-law). It was Madame Mauté who recognised Debussy’s exceptional ...”

“... Montaigne as an act of patronage. In 1573 he became an ‘ordinary gentleman of the chamber’ of Charles IX, an honorary post without pay or duties. In 1577 he received an analogous courtesy appointment from Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot leader who would become Henry IV of France. Montaigne was proud of these honours. The title page of his 1580 edition of ...”

“... Ursprung of Haydn’s material, where its handling is so far from childish. Here he anticipates Charles Rosen’s Classical Style, which has always seemed to be a brilliant codification and tidying up of the rich overview implicit in Tovey’s sprawling oeuvre, in which extraordinary hints and insights are thrown out to left and right in the most hurried ...”

“... quango with laudable aims was not ‘a call to revolutionary change in Nigeria’ – some hope! – but just another cover for stealing money, and lots of it. Ken Wiwa is also coy about how his father made enough money, in an increasingly depressed economy, to send four children to top-notch public schools in England – as though there were no decent ...”

“... friend Henry Fonda that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small ...”

“... them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.’ There might presumably have been some hope for Lewis had his eyes merely been those of a successful rapist. Lewis describes his visit to Pound’s Paris studio in the first of his two volumes of autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). No one answered his knock, but the door was open, so he ...”

“... sanitary wear and rags for cleaning. The German high-fashion industry continued nevertheless, the hope being that it would generate some national revenue to help finance the war. Luxurious feminine designs were created for export only, and glossy photos were published in German fashion magazines. Guenther shows us some of these ornate ensembles, which look ...”

“... adequate rejoinder from the British side so far has been Frank Kermode’s brilliant 1977-78 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, now published under the title The Genesis of Secrecy. Although fully aware of the subtleties of the deconstructivist case, he has yet entered a firm non placet to any form of that theory which tends towards a nihilism of ...”

“... argument for the Hexter case that there really was popular opposition to the proto-absolutism of Charles I. In Virginia there was no community sense, there were no autonomous villages, no towns: settlers with no shared roots in England spread themselves as widely as possible to grow the maximum amount of tobacco for the market, regardless of danger from ...”

“... phenomenon. He saw them as objects of quasi-religious longing, ‘technological angels’ offering hope of spiritual redemption in a secular, science-stunned age. In recent decades they’ve often been described in more menacing terms, but that hasn’t invalidated Jung’s central point: the way a society talks about UFOs provides insights into its deepest ...”

“... were naturalised. They certainly played a part in bringing the Liberals back into power: in the hope that they would repeal the Aliens Act of 1905, which had so severely cut down the tide of immigration. But Dr Alderman is careful not to attribute too much to the Jewish vote, while at the same time noting the Jewish interest in issues which had nothing to ...”

“... given as a gift by the Emperor Bahadur Shah to the Portuguese, who then offered them as a dowry to Charles II at the time of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. What was one to do with such a dowry? Well, through a process of reclamation, the seven fishing islands became Bombay. As Saleem Sinai says (after reciting the opening stanza of the Cathedral and ...”

“... Cambridge, where he met Brooke, Ka Cox and Gwen Darwin, the daughter of a don and granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Later, both Darwin and Raverat studied art at the Slade. Virginia Woolf was fascinated by these Neo-Pagan entanglements, the sense of Rabelaisian sexuality, the counter-cultural world created around Brooke ...”

“... vicious satires against his betters and wound up raving; or the short, fat, gouty corrector Charles de la Motte, described as a ‘pygmy’, a ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘that little figure of papier-mâché’ by the contemporaries who hurled epithets at him with all the zest and accuracy of a literary darts team aiming at a target adorned with the face ...”

“... Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of children, Number of ...”