“... I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses’) to cheer myself up. There may have been a touch of the Ahabs in Denis’s genealogy. Thomas Thatcher, grandfather of the present baronet, was a bit of an adventurer, sailing to New Zealand in the 1870s to seek his fortune rather than following his father and grandfather into farming near ...”

“... of the Russian sate.’ In a telegram from the soldiers of the Nikolaevsky Maritime Battery, on 21 May 1917, comes: ‘We ask for the immediate transfer of Nicholas, Alexandra and their family to the Peter and Paul Fortress in order to institute strict surveillance and to prosecute all those sympathetic to the Romanovs as traitors to the freedom of the Russian ...”

“... when he kissed her hand. It was, Shaw said, ‘a wholly satisfactory love affair ... Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love.’ Shaw’s only certain physical involvement with another human being was an affair with Jenny Patterson, an ...”

“... had praised the modern press as an instrument of democratic enfranchisement: ‘Vulgar though it may be, the press accomplishes a useful task; it is the avant-garde of democracy, it makes reading commonplace and enlarges our public. I know that this enlarged public is precisely what vexes retired literati and young aesthetes. But why should we tremble before ...”

“... is not the Communist candidate, but the nominee of the National Patriotic Bloc of parties. That may be true; but the Communist Party, after its breakthrough victories in the Duma elections in December, was hugely more influential than any of the others. The second most powerful party was Working Russia, led by Victor Anpilov, another ranting anti-semitic ...”

“... but sympathetic view of the Gypsies, almost forces herself to believe that these conferences may mark a turning-point. She observes that, like others before them, this new élite has been rejected by many Gypsies, who consider them to have crossed over into the gadjo world. In many respects they have indeed crossed over, and become ‘career ...”

“... have a narrative content, the fantastic pictures almost seem to have been painted in the way we may have to recount the night’s bad dreams over breakfast before we can get on with the day. His antidote to the diable au corps, his path to sublimation, was to dedicate himself to working patiently, sanely, soberly, from nature, a course taken from about 1872 ...”

“... women’s ‘hero worship’. In doing so, and like his subject, at least in her later work, he may not tell us much about psychoanalysis. But he tells us a great deal about both Horney and ourselves – men as well as ...”

“... first part). And his medical training, the importance of which he emphasises in the Reflections, may explain why he writes so well about the body, gestures and facial expressions. It is a pity he never wrote about Lavater and physiognomy. These virtues are combined with high theoretical ambition. Like many writers of the Frankfurt School, Elias played Marx ...”

“... found the cowed, emaciated, dirty Hassids of the Pale strange and often repulsive. The synagogues may have moved him, but so did sightings of things he associated with Western culture: a classical façade on a Polish manor house; a German bookshop in Brody, where there was even a Hotel Bristol (but can it have been any less seedy than Joseph Roth’s Galician ...”

“... rain, however, a sodden tent, and the arrival over two weeks of just one Meadow Pipit (which may well have been hopping along the coast), convinced me that Popper was absolutely right about the importance of falsification and that I myself wanted to have nothing more to do with it. I tried verification also, taking my turn in another tent on a marsh in ...”

“... create a perfect nakedness for the imperfect, disharmonious body of the aspiring artist. A writer may proudly wear it in Elysium, where it can rightly show his true genius to be free of ornamental lumber and awkward posing. But Kafka, with all his swiftly crystallised artistic ambition, was nevertheless deeply ambivalent about the aspect of life embodied in ...”

“... members – the heads of the only three resident Serbian families and one Croat. The Partisans may have carried the idea of local self-management down from the mountains with the ideological fervour of Marxists, but here power was still yoked to ethnicity. Ironically, a Jew saved Nikola Blazevic’s life. As railway superintendent, Blazevic had used his ...”

“... to be essential reading. But those long appreciative of Brenan’s thought and his sober style may well prefer to stay with the ‘fantasies and evasions’, the distortions of truth, convinced that they served Gerald to distil more important ...”

“... public interest, on the other. We have no means of knowing how his brush with the tabloid press may have affected his attitude, either consciously or subconsciously, now that some kind of decision on the need for a privacy law seems imminent. No doubt that was part of the reasoning behind Mr Mellor’s honourable offer to resign his post. But the Prime ...”