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“... When I was fifteen and a half I received a letter from my new friend Lorna Stockton which announced that she was reading T.S. Eliot, ‘in a tree’. I stared at these words in alarm: who was this T.S. Eliot? Trees, for me, were climbing frames full of cunningly shaped, preferably fatal, challenges to ascent and had no relation to books. Books were read indoors, stiffly, with both knees drawn together, at a table, the pages turned with quavering, elderly care ...”

“... had found the nerve to drop what are surely now the played-out conventions of mainstream realism. Victor Sage has, sometimes. And it is on those occasions that his pieces, never less than dexterous, come alive. The first five stories in Dividing Lines concern reduction, diminution and extinction – of identity, of feeling, of writing itself. His ...”

“... romantic and morbid inclinations. After Roland’s death she described her brother and his friend Victor Richardson as looking ‘tall and fine and knightly ... like courtiers without a king’. As Gorham points out, during the war Brittain lost much of her earlier spiky assertiveness and was content to play the more traditional self-sacrificing role of the ...”

“... he relapse in his last years into the simple piety of his German youth? One of the many virtues of Victor Plahte Tschudi’s book is that it takes Kircher’s efforts in Christian archaeology seriously, and integrates them into a larger story: the story of what the author calls ‘baroque archaeology’, which flourished in Rome from around 1580 to ...”

“... happier at the LRB – you could see it on his face – but then no one minds being treated like a sage. I haven’t spoken about aspects of John’s professional life that I should have spoken about: his translations – Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Proust, Georges Perec and several others. Or his books: on structuralism, on ...”

“... what St Anne is really doing in the Hans Baldung Grien woodcut, I think Steinberg is the victor. In a sense this is the argument he needs to win, if his thesis is to survive, so it is well that he wins it. We have the paintings, he says, and if we consent to look at them rather than adopt the unimaginative, unseeing habits of art historians unhappy ...”

“... the cuckoo being heard. All was not lost, however. Like Voltaire or an eastern philosopher sage, Lewis set himself to do what could be done. He created a wilderness which gradually repopulated itself. As he did so he mused on the curious habits of the London motorists who came at weekends to sit in their cars and survey the ...”

“... the 1970s pretence that Britain was still at the top table of the Big Three or Four, a Victor Power of the Second World War which should never be classed with mere nation-states like France or Albania. Back then, the media and politics thrived on the patriot superlative: this or that British bridge or factory chimney or ancient monument regulation ...”

“... of classical and modern music, and add to the growing popularity of both. In Omon Ra, a novel by Victor Pelevin published in 1992, the eponymous hero declares: ‘I realised at once and early on that only weightlessness can give man genuine freedom which is why all my life I’ve been bored by all those Western radio voices and those books by various ...”

“... a triple layer of imaginary fictions: the book concerns an anonymous amateur scholar who reveres a sage called de Selby whose (imaginary) works – including Golden Hours and Country Album – are listed with footnotes and page numbers, alongside (invented) critical works on de Selby (including Conspectus of the de Selby Dialectic), and also a meta-commentary ...”

“... four and one-half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.’ Victor Hugo was lyrical about the loss: the ‘tumbrils of mud’ that made up nightsoil were ‘the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows ...”

“... contribution. The other essays are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a sort of Finneganese, and long thought to have ...”

“... Paris salons before publication – as Rousseau had done years before with his Confessions. Victor de Broglie (husband of Albertine de Staël, probably Constant’s daughter) gives an account of one such reading, at Madame Récamier’s, where Constant broke into sobs as he neared the end: everyone present, already very moved, began crying as ...”

“... 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting friendship with André Breton, with whom, Wilcken writes, he shared ...”

“... The Resistance had saved its honour, and Potsdam its face, but it was a survivor rather than a victor power. Economically, France was still a predominantly rural society, with a per capita income a little over half of the British standard. Sociologically, the peasantry remained by far its largest class: 45 per cent of the population. Politically, the ...”