“... in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the dying Socrates to his support team ...”

“... education was essentially an inheritance from the curriculum of Tudor grammar schools; after more than four centuries it came to seem part of the natural order of things – an ornament of gentlemanly education which served to mark and reinforce class privilege. In Shakespeare’s day, however, study of the classics was a pragmatic ...”

“... the Weimar period and his service under Hitler may have seen in Venator a defiant self-portrait. Thomas Nevin, in what might be an oblique reference to the passage, reminds them that there is a difference between literature and politics and that ‘the Autor, the anarch, is a Rousseauist construct, safeguard of an egoism that takes itself as the only ...”

“... from European governments. Far from basking in this acclaim, Elias stepped up his output, writing more books in his eighties than in all his previous decades put together. He also acquired disciples, especially in the Netherlands and Germany, who tended the flame after 1990 by issuing unfinished fragments and materials, such as Reflections on a Life. This ...”

“... Parshall’s The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (1994) did for an earlier period: 31 chapters, with more than three hundred illustrations, which constitute a riveting anatomy of the technical production of plates and their images, the mechanisms of distribution and circulation, and the habits of consumption, use and preservation. For all his cautious ...”

“... daytime cafés full of men in trilbys like my uncle were the habitat of Berlin teenagers. We were more likely to think of boats on the Wannsee, a place not yet associated with planned genocide. It is hard to remember, though Hitler made it the staple of his rhetoric in the ironic plethora of voting that took place in its last year, that the republic lasted ...”

“... is a positive version, appears in Parsifal with both the negativity and the eroticism made far more explicit. The person who flies in, early in Act One, bearing a vial of medicinal balm for the stricken king – it can relieve but not cure him – is the same person who caused the king’s wound. Wagner makes Kundry systematically dual: in her service ...”

“... denunciations, and yet things are no further advanced than the day after the referendum. I found more preparation for Brexit on Zeebrugge port’s website than I’ve seen, read or heard from British politicians or (most of) the media. Zeebrugge will be ‘entirely Brexit-proof’, the port authority says. The view from Belgium is that the only place that ...”

“... comes only thirty pages before the novel’s end. And of their first meeting we are not told much more than that Joshua had been ominously introduced by a friend as ‘the man himself’. Riley is interested in a lot of things – looking closely, remembering, restraint – but is most interested in telling an old story in a new way. She tries out several ...”

“... the old fart’s bag of tricks still amuses. But I think I would have liked this novel more had it been the first of the author’s that I’d read. The narrator of Galapagos is Leon Trotsky Trout, son of our old friend Kilgore, the SF writer who has wonderful ideas for novels but can’t write worth a damn. (I’ve seen it said that Trout is based ...”

“... the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans made by tour-promoters ...”

“... academic papers and of undigested research data is exaggerated. Imaginative historians such as Thomas Carlyle have not simply been censured for an excess of poetic licence. They have been forgotten. Yet Carlyle’s convictions on the relationship of history and poetry are at least worthy of consideration. It is important to check and verify, as Carlyle ...”

“... trained as a beautician and sometimes got a little. It might be depilating ladies’ legs, but more often it was scrubbing their floors. Pavel – now Paul – was put in a Jewish children’s home, where his mother visited him on Sundays. From his point of view, the fall of France improved matters, because his parents carried him off to a small spa near ...”

“... book says, ‘one of the great undiscovered eccentrics of the 19th century’. She enjoyed far more than fifteen minutes of fame, even though it did not get her into the usual reference books. She was the subject of a biography, in 1959, by Edward Grierson, Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon, which Brian Thompson commends in his bibliography ...”

“... late 18th century. Benjamin Franklin, the first US ambassador to France, made four return trips. Thomas Paine made five. And Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, made eight, six of them in as many years, starting in 1777, as he became involved in first the American Revolutionary War and then the French Revolution. Lafayette is currently appearing as ...”