“... like, unless we assume she bears some resemblance to the author pictured on the dust-jacket. It may come as a jolt to the reader to hear Faith addressed, in ‘The Long Distance Runner’, as ‘fat mama’ by an impudent adolescent boy.) The first story in the volume, ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’, begins, ‘I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt ...”

“... prose insists on the briskly knowable, and shuts off any of the apertures his religious interests may have opened. ‘Tsililla had been raised on a Tolstoyan-Freudian-Socialist Kibbutz in the Galilee, equipped from infancy with such a plenitude of answers to life’s questions as to leave her awash in useless certainties.’ And that is all we hear about ...”

“... disabling paranoid schizophrenia. With a nice sense of the dramatic, Nasar starts her story on a May afternoon in 1959, with Nash, 30 years old, and with ‘a vast, distorted universe whispering in his head’, flopped in an armchair in the secure lounge of Maclean Hospital, an asylum near Boston where he had been committed for observation by MIT ...”

“... in a ceremony that involves being held down and grotesquely smeared with watermelon juice. She may even be Jack’s cousin. But the spectre of incest is already effaced by the angelic evidence of the couple’s child. Gloria’s alternative fate is held up for pity in the figure of her estranged mentor, Julia Mortimer, the schoolteacher bitterly dying ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Paris after she had moved there from Prague in the fall of 1925, suggests that Irma Kudrova may well be Tsvetaeva’s definitive biographer. In the breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her perception and intelligence, Kudrova is superior to subsequent biographers of Tsvetaeva, including – it must be admitted – myself. Irma Kudrova made two ...”

“... is a bust of Hazlitt, looking noble, on three books of carved stone, labelled ‘Napoleon’. It may be that an admiring sculptor will add a head of Alan Brien, looking like an Arab ...”

“... habit of making at different stages of their careers. The last factor is more important than it may at first appear. Dickens, it is often observed, apparently embarked on working notes only with his fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), and systematised the practice with Dombey and Son (1846-47), his seventh novel. Like other commentators, Stone ...”

“... the answer is simple – in regard to our mother, at least.’ (In regard to all the others, it may be unbearably complex.) ‘There is documentation; and the documentation is unlikely to have been faked.’ Unlikely, but not improbable. Raising the unwanted child of a sister, or a daughter, as one’s own is not uncommon among working-class families, often ...”

“... of West’s long-dead 19th-century fiancée. (So that’s all right then.) Much may have changed in these 113 years, but Dr Leete’s formal suit is still much the same (correct). The ladies still withdraw after dinner (off-target). Leete still offers his guest a courteous cigar – ‘Do you smoke?’ – while beginning his explanations ...”

“... the instructor said something at the beginning about women having an aptitude for the form. That may have made the men feel more inclined to assert themselves. There was one who seemed to take a bit of interest in me. At least he always smiled at me after he said anything, as if I was the one who could get what he meant. When I smiled back I tried to convey ...”

“... an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry such that people in Caracas and Madrid knew they were simultaneously acting out their roles in, say, ‘1627 AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ...”

“... oil has been utterly essential to Mrs Thatcher’s electoral success. Academics and commentators may ruminate on the Thatcher ethos and its effect on social attitudes, but the voters are looking in their pockets. The second undeserved bonus which Mrs Thatcher has been granted is a divided opposition. It is an obvious point but one which cannot be ...”

“... because of this, their chances in America were severely circumscribed. Whatever their prospects may have been, they complained loudly, and not a few begged for harsh corporal punishment, even for death, instead of being sent to the Colonies. Ekirch might have depicted these people as primitive bandits resisting the oppressive forces of capitalism. He wisely ...”

“... ideal of the universal man was not yet dead in Bernini’s Rome, as the example of Bernini himself may remind us, a sculptor and architect who was also capable of writing a play for Carnival and staging it in a theatre of his own design. Come to that, Orazio Grassi was something of a universal man, a major architect, as Redondi points out, as well as an ...”