The father of the narrator in Ginzburg's biography of a family and their era – spanning the rise of fascism and the Nazi era – is famous for his outbreaks of anger.
Meanwhile his viral outbreak movie Contagion (2011, Warner, 12) hits the DVD shelves, taking its lead from such time-honoured disaster epics as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, in which a galaxy of stars would struggle to outlive one another as the world around them crumbled, sank or exploded.
"The challenge is that outbreaks are actually extremely rare events, but with terrible consequences," says Nicholas Grassly, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London who has done his own outbreak modeling.
His teachers and classmates feared or ignored his disruptive outbreaks.
There is something infectious about his sudden outbreaks of jollity.
Freddy has perfect grammar, but, in keeping with his non-standard tastes, he prefers to use a finely discriminated array of non-standard English expressions to characterize his regular outbreaks of good feeling.
Yet he cannot cry, and when his neighbour discovers his role in the outbreak she tweets his picture and he becomes hunted, particularly by a young, female Indian doctor.
Thus his sudden, destructive outbreak of optimism.
So Bussell began the "early life" segment with the stock statement: "the journey to stardom began with trauma", and talked us through a father abandoning his family, the outbreak of the second world war (which found her studying ballet in the Netherlands), and the young Hepburn surviving what is called the Hongerwinter by grinding up tulip bulbs in the Dutch city of Arnhem to make "flour".
Perhaps Pence, enabler of his own HIV outbreak in Indiana, truly is president.
