“... is proposed, with relish, that many led dull lives: You wake up around noon, and meet Vinnie and Frank for an espresso. Vinnie and Frank have to meet Tony and Pete, so you drive all the way to Staten Island and have another cup of coffee. Tony and Pete don’t show. So you drag yourself all the way to Queens to see another ...”

“... view the diagram from space that humans had mastered both mathematics and agriculture. In Austria, Joseph von Littrow proposed digging trenches in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them ablaze. Charles Cros, a poet and inventor, petitioned the French government to fund the construction of a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the ...”

“... the ridiculously overblown statue for the graveside scene in The Barefoot Contessa (it ended up in Frank Sinatra’s garden until one of his later wives made him throw it out). Even though her appetites were decidedly her own and even though she was happy to exploit the effect of her own fame and glamour, Gardner was unable to rise above Hollywood’s ...”

“... way of saying that he was for ten years a foreign correspondent of the FT; his authority (like Joseph Roth’s, say) is altogether deeper, more committed, more structural, than that of journalism. He reminds me of Washington DC in Lowell’s distich: ‘The stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth.’ It is a ...”

“... The Second World War was fought both over and inside every cinema in Europe. In 1941 Joseph Goebbels declared that one of his key goals was ‘to establish German film as the dominant cultural world power’. He came very close to succeeding. Within a few weeks of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, his newly created propaganda ministry set to work ...”

“... the state capital of Missouri, across the street from the Lincoln Institute, where his father, Joseph, taught blacksmithing and wheelwrighting. Chester’s parents were both children of former slaves, members of the ‘second generation’ of African Americans in the postbellum era, but otherwise had little in common. ...”

“... a real historical personage) of the first great Polish chrestomathy, New Athens (from which Jacob Frank will learn his Polish), a chapbook of the most interesting thoughts and sayings of the past, to which he has decided to add the wisdom of the Jews, so far closed to him. The learned rabbi, Elisha Shorr, to whom Father Chmielowski proposes an exchange of ...”

“... through the fledgling Weimar Republic. In the subsequent Reichstag debate, the chancellor, Joseph Wirth, caused uproar by accusing the right-wing press of inciting the murder. Pointing to the nationalist benches, he declared: ‘There stands the enemy who drips his poison into the wounds of a people. There stands the enemy, and there is no doubt about ...”

“... different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman ...”

“... and proud of her own: some of her ripostes in the conversations she gleefully records are frank to the point of insult. The difference between Cicely and Alma is that Cicely is just any debutante and Algernon just any deb’s delight (though wittier than most). Alma, on the other hand, craved to be ‘a personality’ and no man who wasn’t one could ...”

“... that is both fluent and memorable. As a bonus, there is a section consisting of two poems by Joseph Brodsky – one on Cape Cod, the other on Venice. Translated by Hecht – better, it seems to me, than ever before – here are more of Brodsky’s short unrelated sentences following each other with uncompromising inventiveness and inquisitiveness. In his ...”

“... and yet fast. What a difference it would have made, for instance, if, when he valuably gives us Frank MacNamara’s ‘A Convict’s Tour to Hell’ (1839), which he calls ‘the first important poem composed in English in Australia’, Murray had acknowledged that all he claims for MacNamara can be claimed for John Clare in England at the same date. Of ...”

“... than was the English soldier on the field of Waterloo’. By the end of the 19th century, however, Joseph Lister had introduced an effective antisepsis routine, and this, combined with anaesthesia, had transformed surgery (though mortality rates were still high). Surgeons were becoming heroes: in the United States, William and Charles Mayo, the founders of the ...”

“... never forgave him and, a decade later, ranged herself with the young Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim, who had declared Liszt’s New German School ‘contrary to the innermost spirit of music’ and ‘strongly to be deplored and condemned’. The ensuing war dragged on into the 1880s, but by then – with Brahms and Wagner thoroughly established ...”

“... na Gile’ (‘Brightness Most Bright’), which defeated Mangan in the 19th century, and Frank O’Connor in the 20th, doesn’t prove manipulable by Thomas Kinsella either – but all are of the utmost interest and signficance in denoting the cultural resources of the unregenerate Irish. As literature in Irish dwindled virtually to a handful of ...”