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“... least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty in her yellow dress. Gore talked, imitated, made ...”

“... Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.) The novella was written after Mann helped pitch a film on the Ten Commandments to ...”

“... standard life, by Conyers Read, is in two volumes (published in 1955 and 1960), each larger than Stephen Alford’s new book. Alford, the author of The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis (1998), has chosen to focus his study on the controversial subject of the Queen of Scots. Mary Stuart always claimed she was the ...”

“... people like me directing films, I would do anything. Working with Karel was special. Just so nice. Stephen Frears (film director): In 1965, I was working at the Royal Court in London, which was a bit like being on call to the Borgias, a place full of brilliant and terrifying men. Then Karel came to direct a play by the Italian playwright Franco Brusati. His ...”

“... fluency and suggestiveness. Only a few hours elapse in the narrative. Nathan Zuckerman, the young author of some well-received short stories, spends an evening, night and morning at the New England home of a reclusive elder writer he esteems, E.I. Lonoff. The dates and other details of Nathan’s career tally with Roth’s own. Lonoff’s speciality has ...”

“... on these two books about judges are a good place to start. The first carries a photograph of a young man who appears to have found a circuit judge’s robes and half-glasses in the dressing-up box and put them on wrong. The second carries a photograph of four Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which ...”

“... me. ‘And, frankly, does anyone in Paris still care? As for the Africans, the majority are very young. For them, France is just another foreign country, when it’s not a convenient scapegoat for their many woes.’ Bourgi’s Françafrique, by tacit admission, is a Potemkin village. A general I spoke to recently in Paris – a figure whose long history of ...”

“... to the Utilitarians or the Pre-Raphaelites, both of which, in fact, had direct links with the Stephen family. Williams contrasted the Bloomsbury Group with the Godwin circle of the 1780s and 1790s, which he saw as a genuinely oppositional group, whose ‘rational and civilising proposals’ were ‘met by the crudest kind of ...”

“... appear more decorative than radical. The shock of the new is hard to feel at a distance, but as Stephen Walsh observes, we expect the music of the modernist generation, of whom Debussy was the first, to be difficult, abstruse, even rebarbative. The works of Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and Bartók continue to present us with a residue of toughness. By ...”

“... of Aquarium, is how a newly-promoted Soviet general, with his own clientage to create, recruits a young protégé to Soviet military intelligence. GRU, the Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Soviet General Staff, is an entirely different matter from the KGB, the secret police whose presence in the Soviet Union is ubiquitous and which would-be recruits ...”

“... at all hours of the day and night) jotted down ideas for fear of forgetting them. The young Breuning is intrigued by the appearance of a Beethoven sketch-book, which he finds on a piece of furniture in Beethoven’s apartment (‘it was completely full of notes, written in fits and starts, and even additional staves drawn freehand right across the ...”

“... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were ...”

“... root & flourish in [his] own time’. More than that, he was liked. Among scientists perhaps only Stephen Hawking has given his admirers such a strong feeling that they knew him personally. Strangers wrote with random queries, such as why do pigeons fly in circles, and anecdotes of animal behaviour: R.M. Middleton of West Hartlepool explained how he had ...”

“... Journalistic ethos was overstrained in Cooke’s case, for her infant addict didn’t exist. The young journalist got caught, the paper was humiliated, but the only element in the tale that was brand new was the level of mea culpa that seemed to invigorate all the participants. In recent times, this level of regret has become somewhat operatic, and this ...”

“... voiced against the French Communist Party, make an affirmative answer distressingly plausible. Stephen Wilson’s large and learned book, in which he studies the political, social and intellectual aspects of anti-semitism in France at the end of the 19th century, is therefore very timely, as is the reprinting of Dreyfus’s recollections of his conviction ...”