“... The upright fiction of Aharon Appelfeld arises from the level facts of his anguished and brave young life. Like the novels themselves, a note on their author is laconic, lapidary and on oath:Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Czernovitz, Bukovina (now part of the USSR). His mother was killed by the Nazis, and he was deported at the age of eight to a concentration camp, from which he escaped ...”

“... plight of the 400-strong regiment having only six women and the need for six more – preferably young and attractive. The military authorities were seriously concerned at the way in which the Indian Government was bowing before pressure from home. Cardwell’s short-service scheme had meant a more rapid turn-round of the garrison and a higher proportion of ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”

“... A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much better feeling of what ...”

“... In June 1934, a young Romanian Jew published a book about being a Jew in Romania. Mihail Sebastian’s De Doua mii de ani (‘For 2000 Years’) was not an autobiography or a novel or a diary, although a bit of each. The hero, who is never named, lives the tragicomedy of assimilation in a land and a culture that both invite and repel ...”

“... sponger who claims to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but ...”

“... in which the likes of Kim Philby were likely to thrive. For the two changes worked together: the young intellectual recruits as a class tended to feel contemptuous, even angry, at their elders’ continuing obsession with the Bolshevik menace to the virtual exclusion of the threat posed by the Nazis. One of the most interesting passages in Glees’s book is ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”

“... against aspiring newcomers. The musical Hamilton exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’ President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving the theatre, calling on the new administration ‘to ...”

“... Eilis Lacey is a young Enniscorthy woman who has never dreamed of leaving Ireland. Friary Street and Castle Street, the square and the cathedral: the grey co-ordinates of her small County Wexford town will doubtless always be with her. But this is 1950s Ireland, in which there is ‘no work for anyone . . . no matter what their qualifications ...”

“... predecessor’s clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for ...”

“... work to be had.This is what happened in Tigray and Wollo. The result, filmed by Mohammed Amin for Michael Buerk’s BBC report in October 1984, shocked the world. Six weeks later, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee summoned the directors of Oxfam and Save the Children to a hearing. Why, the committee chairman, Anthony Kershaw, wanted to know, had the ...”

“... spirit of Beethoven, [who] said … he was fond of me, and that in nature I was like himself as a young man … What would the doctors say to that? A Ticket certainly, for insanity. No, it is the beginning of a new life, a new vision.’Gurney died in 1937, aged 47, after spending the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, leaving behind ...”

“... which meant that for most of the 20th century it was deemed best to be rich, white, thin and young. In the England of Enninful’s youth, this meant Sloaney blondes with big hair and big shoulder-pads. In America, it was society women with famous surnames and huge clapboard houses on the coast of Maine. Paris Vogue was much the same, just with nipples ...”

“... jewellery and expensive clothes overlaying a diet-starved body, and the same clawed, no longer young hands about which nothing can be done whatsoever. Here, however, she is able to hide them behind the thousands of document files that surround her, a solid wall of research material on which someone has plopped a clearly reluctant cat. As those who have ...”