“... strides like conquering giants,’ she wrote. They set up home, very poor, in a ‘terrible’ room with arum lilies on the patio and ‘old sorceresses’ squatting on the pavement outside. Brown describes Loy cooking tortillas on a charcoal stove in their ‘dark, earthern-floored cave . . . in the garbaged outskirts’, but a letter of 30 April gives ...”

“... destinies of most of his heroes – Hanno Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger, Aschenbach, Hans Castorp, Adrian Leverkuhn, Felix Krull – are shaped by their uneasy and ambiguous homosexuality. For Mann being German came first, and he learned, as Anthony Heilbut rather quaintly puts it, to read German history as one long queer epic – he alluded to Frederick the ...”

“... elsewhere. He took conducting lessons from Sargent and charmed his way onto the podium to watch Adrian Boult conduct student orchestras. It wasn’t Boult’s technique as a conductor that interested him, he said later: ‘I was listening to the sound. I knew quite early I had an ear for texture.’ Composition lessons at the RCM were focused too ...”

“... had taken had been torpedoed and sunk. I remember that as my father told me this in the sitting room of his Wiltshire home, sunlight was filtering in through a confusion of leaves, furry and prickly to touch, on his now dead mother’s scented geranium, and there were dust motes dancing in the space between us. Faced with my urgent question – ‘Did your ...”

“... comforting each other. The house was chaos, with decorators and builders. My father was in his room and I would drift in there. I was of an age when I wasn’t much use for anything else. So I used to sit there as an errand boy and got very involved in his predicament. There were lots of sick death-jokes, grins, all that. I didn’t know how ill he ...”

“... not to go near the fence.Other farmers conducted similar trials. In 1861, a ten-year-old called Adrian Latta had attached sharp spikes to the bottom of his family’s fences to prevent hogs from coming onto their land. ‘The hogs got through a few times after the barbs were put in,’ he noted. ‘However, the barbs had the desired effect as the owner saw ...”

“... kits, grenades, machetes and pistols. As a man with cyber-currency, he was welcome in every room and was never checked. He was anybody as well as nobody. He could have been a teenager, a warrior, a terrorist or a psychopath. So long as he had currency he was okay. The only two sites where the website operators checked him out were Black Market Reloaded ...”