“... what happened at Guernica to ‘Red hordes’, and as late as the 1970s a contributor to William Buckley’s National Review was still making the accusation.) Pointing the finger at Red militiamen also neatly avoided the question of German involvement. Steer had plenty of first-hand evidence of the Condor Legion’s presence in Spain: he had himself ...”

“... if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally ...”

“... Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent biographies, this ...”

“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”

“... become human. Mothers’ and babies’ calculations of love reflect the law proposed by the late William Hamilton, a creative genius of sociobiology. (Hamilton died this year of malaria contracted in the Congo, where he was pursuing his latest ideas on the transmission of disease between species – arguably a martyr to his own passion for truth.) Hamilton ...”

“... can see why Rubens might have been jealous. The old man’s skin, his slightly rheumy eye and the white hair of his beard are wonderfully realised. Rubens tends to make use of a repertoire of effective conventions (the marks for an eyelid, folds in the skin, cheeks and so on) and unites them in a springy dance of brushstrokes. Van Dyck observes finer ...”

“... creole families of colonial Venezuela, the familias mantuanas as they were known (from the long white mantua or gown worn by the women), he was one of the privileged few who could afford to travel in Europe as a young man. In Paris in 1804, he was dazzled by the spectacle of Napoleon’s coronation and yearned for similar personal glory. An eccentric ...”

“... seems briefly possible that Ishiguro is setting out to re-create a vanished set of perceptions, as William Golding did with his Neanderthals in The Inheritors. Lok, Mal, Nil and the others had pictures in their minds, and some way of sharing them, though they lacked language. Beatrice and Axl are in the opposite predicament, with language available but a ...”

“... into a commonwealth of nations, Wilson’s nose was put out of joint and the mood in the White House was said to be ‘depressed’. Nevertheless the US emerged in a very strong position when the end of the war finally came. Wilson, without properly consulting his allies, dictated the nature and content of the armistice negotiations with ...”

“... couldn’t help but look after the weak. Well, not much wrong with such a notion in the black and white, troubled world of the 1940s and 1950s (or even the present one, just for a bit of a rest). After the war, in books but most of all in old movies, these reluctant action heroes became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic ...”

“... Isis because of its violence. It’s an unusual turnabout: Downing Street more hawkish than the White House. But perhaps that’s of little consequence. In a remarkably frank articulation of London’s subservience to Washington, William Hague said in response to the Isis advances: ‘We will support the United States in ...”

“... don’t like feeling that they are being teased. When Shostakovich repeatedly quotes Rossini’s William Tell Overture in the first movement of the Fifteenth Symphony, is this to be understood as a motif for freedom, as some commentators have speculated? A hint that Shostakovich, like Rossini, had ‘lived slightly too long’, as he suggested in a letter to ...”

“... colourful local characters the narrator meets along the way. This is true of Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t doing ...”

“... sublime emotions. In her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), Anna Seward quoted a ‘Mr White’ from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 who said ‘the style of the sonnet should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps ...”

“... and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons; they usually sound like upper-middle-class white people, probably well educated, perhaps artists, writers, academics, translators. She writes about people from her world, the people we expect that she knows. The characters are usually anonymous, but they are never archetypes, they are never meant to ...”