“... because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified ...”

“... autism to be rare, homogeneous and totally debilitating: a form of psychosis that afflicted young children, sealing them off permanently from normal, loving relations with others and the world. Autism was seen as outside the realm of regular human functioning. When Oliver Sacks read Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he ...”

“... extract money from his wealthy parents, a chloroformed handkerchief was held for too long over the young man’s face. Nevertheless, Negri was sentenced to prison, only to be released under Parliamentary immunity when elected as a Radical MP. Escaping to France, where he had the support of Deleuze and Guattari, he continued his academic career in Paris (...”

“... It was American scientists who went ballistic over Velikovsky, not historians, and one purpose of Michael Gordin’s probing and intelligent The Pseudoscience Wars is to ask why they responded to Velikovsky as they did. Putting that sort of question is a sign of changed times. Passions have cooled; circumstances have altered. Almost all previous books about ...”

“... Age, and after World War Two they returned to see if it was still as it had been. In 1929, the young M.F.K. Fisher had her initiation chez Aux Trois Faisans in Dijon – ‘safe in a charmed gastronomical circle’, having ‘seen the far shores of another world’. In the 1950s, the journalist Waverly Root lectured meatloaf-era Americans on the glories of ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”

“... he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’ And there is Milos Hrma, the young, timid railway signalman in Hrabal’s most famous novel, Closely Observed Trains. When he discovers that the stationmaster may become an Inspector of State Railways, he is excited, and reverently asks: ‘An inspector, like that … that’s the same rank ...”

“... After he died, in 1592, posthumous editions of the Essays were prepared by Marie de Gournay, a young intellectual and admirer of Montaigne’s who became his literary executor. Philippe Desan’s biography aims to debunk the familiar picture of Montaigne as an aristocratic sage in retirement. ‘The literary and philosophical constitution of the ...”

“... and evaluating international markets.Even when their projects failed – Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write that a McKinsey-led reorganisation of the NHS in 1974 was a ‘proliferation of paper’ and a bureaucratic mess – they were hired again and again by the British government to reduce employee numbers and institute unpopular ...”

“... Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.Translators always tell us where they stand on the matter of fidelity – accurate but sometimes awkward, or fluent but ...”

“... Churchill’s disastrous election campaign in 1945, and the abuse he received for it, even from young protégés like his beloved Michael Foot, was unnerving. His wartime colleague Clement Attlee called him ‘the man in public life who is most widely distrusted by decent men of all parties’. Beaverbrook’s career as a ...”

“... and if, for Wordsworth, it was just then ‘bliss to be alive’ and ‘very heaven’ to be young, you couldn’t tell that from Malthus’s surviving early sermons: recycled, inoffensive homilies in which the revolutionary events in France were scarcely even noises off. (The mild young Malthus could have been a ...”

“... I should love to go to a dance or do something amusing. He is old and self-absorbed, and I am young and long to do something wild. I’d like to turn somersaults instead of going to bed. But with whom?’ As well as bearing Tolstoy a baker’s dozen of children, she midwifed his books, hand-copying and, she claims, correcting and editing them. The ...”

“... with Simon Sechter, Vienna’s acknowledged specialist. He didn’t expect to die just yet.Few young composers can have had more formidable precursors, oppressively close in time and place. Vienna was the city of Mozart (who had died five years before Schubert was born), of Haydn (who overlapped him by twelve years) and of Beethoven, who, for almost the ...”