“... Numbers’ Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and many others. And his clubbability did not end with his death. Throughout the 20th century his image, his name and his character – modest, dedicated, optimistic – were recruited in the service of British and American big science, as the inventor of the transformer, the dynamo and the electric motor, those icons of ...”

“... DeCarava’s grey palette.In a career that spanned sixty years, from 1948 until shortly before his death in 2009, DeCarava took plenty of pictures of the already famous: jazz musicians like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Scott’s hands. Sarah Vaughan turns and flashes a smile at the camera; Ornette Coleman looks ...”

“... Vertigo – James Stewart climbing onto the roof from which his colleague is about to fall to his death. De Palma’s voice says: ‘I saw Vertigo in 1958. I saw it at Radio City Music Hall. I will never forget it.’ As he speaks the last sentence his image appears on screen. He is sitting in front of a fireplace, as he will be for the rest of the movie, but ...”

“... had much difficulty in recovering it. The Disraeli Letters have evidently been of help to Sarah Bradford in her biography. She is able to dot some i’s and cross some t’s, and she writes well and clearly. I am not sure that a new life of Disraeli is really justified, but I cannot claim to be the most impartial judge. She has had access to letters ...”

“... cover with its photograph of Pat Kavanagh at the back, dates of her marriage to Barnes and of her death included. Erratic flight at the start and abrupt death at the end: could this go well? Might it go too well? Wasn’t there something not only artful but arch about the concept of pairing that structures the book? ‘You ...”

“... him to give a lecture and he fascinated his fellow prisoners by discussing the prospect of death, with reference to such German writers as Rilke, Husserl, Jaspers and – despite his reputation as a ‘Nazi philosopher’ – Heidegger. He also agreed to take part in their Christmas celebrations, writing, directing and acting in a play which presented ...”

“... volume is dedicated to the memory of her father, and ‘My Father’ records her learning of his death (in New Zealand) while coincidentally visiting the Manchester of his childhood, passing en route signs to nowhere, to the names of some nothing streets beatified in my family history file. A sense of absences on the map translates, as much as for ...”

“... terrible and somewhat misleading word’. The word is terrible, presumably, because it conceals death in its very announcement of life: ‘those dying generations’, Yeats wrote, but then all generations die, that’s what they do. And it is misleading because it bundles together very different people at the behest of a clock or a calendar. But we do live ...”

“... Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud speak with flawless English accents, as does Sarah Gadon as Emma, Jung’s all too perfect wife. Knightley speaks fluent American-Russian, and Vincent Cassel as the disreputable Otto Gross sounds as French as he always does, indeed repeats more or less word for word his role in Black Swan. However, the ...”

“... Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk and old member of the Stepney Elocution Class, was stabbed to death in the street near his home in Ilford. His wife, Edith, was with him; her lover and former lodger, Frederick Bywaters, was the attacker. These circumstances were not disputed when the couple were charged with Thompson’s murder. But when they were found ...”

“... Macmillan’s fellow MP Bob Boothby and demanded a divorce, claiming that her youngest daughter, Sarah, was Boothby’s child. From being regarded as a jolly sort, keen on golf and a dab hand at opening fêtes, Dorothy suddenly revealed unsuspected Wagnerian depths of passion, saying to Boothby: ‘Why did you ever wake me? I never want to see any of my ...”

“... at Sinai; the elaboration of the law or teaching (torah means ‘teaching’); and finally the death of Moses as his people are on the verge of the promised land. Biblical style is famous for its stony reticence, for a mimesis that Erich Auerbach called ‘fraught with background’. This reticence is surely not as unique as Auerbach claimed – Herodotus ...”

“... seems to have been a belief that temptation, particularly sexual temptation, fades as nearness to death increases. Also, wisdom should have been acquired by the old, and should lead to virtue. St Bernard went further and held that since the old should have arrived at wisdom and virtue, a young man, by achieving these, could be old in the ‘true’ sense of ...”

“... and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this: The mangled frog abides incog, The uninteresting actual frog: The hypothetic frog alone ...”

“... weeping over, and partly because those who fall from a lofty height make a greater splash. The death of a princess has complex consequences in society as a whole; the death of a chauffeur does not. In a democratic age, by contrast, the ranks of potential tragic protagonists have swollen immeasurably. Anybody plucked from ...”