“... novels bristle with bits of autobiography. Take Le Rouge et le Noir. One of the books on which the young Julien Sorel dotes, is a book which moved the adolescent Henri Beyle: Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise. When Julien starts taking letters from dictation, his employer, M. de La Mole, notices to his dismay that his newly engaged secretary spells cela with ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”

“... has lived a quiet life there since her husband died in 1967. To the more than a hundred thousand young blacks who had come to the rally, hearing Mandela mention the name Luthuli was to hear the voice of an older generation reaching back still further with a gesture that not merely awakened the past but, in paying it homage, reclaimed it. Just a fortnight ...”

“... brought to life in April Blood, a history of the conspiracy that very nearly took the life of the young Lorenzo de’ Medici before he had a chance to become the ‘Magnifico’ of legend. Martines describes his book as a work of political history, but April Blood is most compellingly political in that it tells the story of a polity, a city state, poised ...”

“... of them in the Archives of the Royal Irish Academy: an Irish countess, a Russian princess, a young woman from Co. Cork and her lady’s maid. They come to us from the journals that the young woman, Katherine Wilmot, kept during her travels on the Continent in 1801-3 and to Russia from 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her ...”

“... of his own, Gente en la Playa, going to the beach on Sundays to record, in neo-realist fashion, a young film-maker’s impressions. (He doesn’t mention whether or not he had seen Emmer’s famous 1950 feature Domenica d’Agosto.) His activity began to annoy: using the simple materials to hand, particularly available light only, the ...”

“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... most famous, most performed work, Miss Julie. Strindberg and his family, including three young children, were staying in a dilapidated mansion not far from the Danish coast, chaotically run by a crazed countess and her feckless steward (her secret half-brother and lover), who became Strindberg’s Julie and her lover, the valet Jean. Prideaux says ...”

“... jockey, George Woolf, his regular jockey, Red Pollard, having broken his leg galloping a wild young racehorse as a favour to a friend. Seabiscuit is well aware of the cultural baggage the horse was carrying with him: the ‘little horse’ drew more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, Hitler or Mussolini; ‘Seabiscuit Day’ at Santa Anita brought ...”

“... of England that they arrived with were sadly wide of the mark; curious distillations in which David Niven-like aristocrats dispensed fairness and tolerance in a Dickensian landscape. ‘All I knew about England was what I read,’ says Teddy Peiro, who was born in Argentina: ‘I was very fond of the famous detective, Derek Lawson, and his ...”

“... Exchequer, and Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade – and, down on the Bristol waterfront, a young carter called Ernest Bevin was getting himself elected chairman of a newly established carmen’s branch of the Dockers’ Union? The question gains added point when joined to the now fashionable question whether the current political dominance of Margaret ...”

“... Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian ...”

“... clergyman’s wife,’ Quaife tells us, quoting one of his court cases, ‘saw the young man try to put his hand up her daughter’s dress as they sat at table,’ and there was recrimination. The young man boasted: ‘I’ll fuck thee and thy daughter before I go home… I have fucked ten old women of this ...”

“... 12 rounds with the black limousines, trying to cross the road, so I was happy to encounter the young models willing to show me inside. The gargoyle count at Paris fashion events is always high and that is part of the entertainment. Before I’d even found my seat, I’d spotted Stella McCartney in a blue net veil talking to Suzy Menkes, Claudia Schiffer ...”