“... I remember even now, seemed deeply involved with the rhythm of my own spirit.’ Be that as it may, Plomer was seasick, although he never admitted it in his own version of the voyage. Van der Post had to cope with jealousy: Plomer and Captain Mori got on famously and the Captain started to translate Turbott Wolfe, which had just caused a great stir (and ...”

“... it must have been something like an anxiety brushing the fringes of the mind. James McBryde may have been, in a sense, Monty’s Arthur Hallam, but was far from having been a prime passion in the grave. Monty, as Mr Cox insists, never looked for intensity in friendship – although he had, as Arthur Benson expresses it, ‘rather a romantic ...”

“... to the funfair Disneyland and, ultimately, the educational park Disneyworld. (George, unlike Walt, may live to see his academy: he’s still under 40.) Like Disney, Lucas has a special relationship with the child and, like Disney again, he has the knack of treating his largely adult audiences as boys and tomboys without offending their dignity. (Although more ...”

“... Wagner, ostensibly to manage the complexity of directing their own music, but with a keen eye, we may be sure, on its potential for self-aggrandisement. Otto Klemperer seems to have taken his size for granted. Tyranny came as naturally to him as to a child, and he exercised it with a child-like innocence. ‘Among other incivilities, he had, it was ...”

“... Gelli has escaped from the Swiss prison from which he was about to be extradicted to Italy, and may now be in Latin America; Calvi is dead; Archbiship Marcinkus, banker of the Vatican who could say so much if he wished to, is safely ensconced behind its walls. In Italy, where there is no strong central government, but strong alternative seats of power in ...”

“... between science and ‘the humanities’. Wilson himself appears vaguely aware that there may be trouble here, and he’s not very clear about what the programme comes to. ‘Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the ...”

“... word to a phrase which unites mankind’, the moment ‘to which all theatre leads’. In this he may be wrong, but he knows what he’s saying, and he has thought through the consequences. Throughout his career, Brook has sought to define the nature of that moment, of itself and in relation to the moments which surround it. In the essays that make up The ...”

“... fact only the title-story of the eight that make up All around Atlantis has an ‘I’, and this may signal a further shift in Eisenberg’s self-denying aesthetic, her predilection for the other view that leaves more room for the voice of the text. In her two earlier collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, 12 years ago and Under the 82nd Airborne ...”

“... groups of that sort did exist in New York and also in Chicago. But the great ones, though they may have occasionally frequented these foyers, were usually about their business elsewhere. Think, for example, of Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens, both New England insurance executives and both doing the entirely unexpected things they chose to do, while ...”

“... all in their proper places. Such idealism is hardly appropriate for a novelist, no matter how he may feed on the negative consequences of its failure. Yet people evidently entered Waugh’s emotional life from time to time (at least up to the time of his second marriage) about whom his novels could not, and could never have had, anything to say. In the bleak ...”

“... about immorality among the aristocracy at the end of the 18th century. As Stone shows, there may indeed have been a rise in patrician adultery at this time. The number of divorce bills coming before Parliament doubled in the 1780s and 1790s to 41 per decade. Yet what most provoked anxiety at this time were the American and French Revolutions abroad, and ...”

“... up regularly, and give an estimate of the size of the pool. I calculate that around 100,000 people may have read the first edition: a substantial intellectual constituency, albeit diachronically gerrymandered.) But Ekman is the man who took Darwin’s anecdotes and validated them with tidy experimental protocols, cultural neutrality and adequate ...”

“... heavily-populated Berkshire. Once again, there were arguments about the figures. But when, in May 1988, a government committee produced the results of a long and thorough inquiry into child cancers in and around the Dounreay plant in Scotland, the question which I hadn’t asked in 1964 was answered. There is a high rate of child cancer in the area, so ...”

“... generate an uncertainty which is added to by a narrator who is not identified by name, and who may well be Chatwin himself. Although he isn’t quite the full-blooded Unreliable Narrator beloved of Post-Modernism, he comes close: ‘Did he have a moustache? I forget. Add a moustache, subtract a moustache ...’ He meets Utz in Prague in 1967, in the course ...”

“... by Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Like Rybakov, Voinovich has been overtaken by events: whatever may be the end-result of the Gorbachovshchina, for the moment the progress towards a grey, featureless socialist future seems to have been halted, and what might have been a reasonable bet in the days of Brezhnev or Andropov now appears to be very much of a long ...”