“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 (...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took sixty years ago of the ‘School of London’ and Colony Room members Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach together at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. Paul wanted to conjure the power of that boys’ gang and express her own uneasy position vis-à-vis this now auratic company. ‘I belong among them,’ she asserts, ‘even if they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part in Kevin Sharpe’s admittedly already massive study of Tudor spin-doctoring. Sharpe’s subject is the considerable range of devices which the Tudor ...”

“... advertisers happy and the mind empty. Kitty Kelley’s books arrived in my life when I was quite young. They seemed almost dazzlingly competent, frighteningly readable, partaking of the same notions of glitz and sex, power and money, falsehood, revenge, hubris and comeuppance that had characterised an earlier kind of bestseller, airport novels written by ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... baby, grew up to resemble his mother in several unfortunate ways: as a perversely chaste young man, who loved hunting but reviled women, he incurred the wrath of Aphrodite. In a story told by Euripides, Seneca and Racine, Hippolytus spurns the advances of his stepmother Phaedra, who, inflamed by passion, accuses him of rape, driving him to take his ...”

“... to suppress my fear. ‘And what is your ■■■■ check list?’ ‘You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to Jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline.’ ‘And what crime is that?’ I said. ‘Look at the hijackers: they were the same way.’ Aside from the points on ...”

“... of his neck stand on end, a statement it would be as hard to imagine issuing from the lips of a young American professor in pursuit of tenure as it would be unthinkable in the writing of Georg Lukács. It is the kind of thing anybody might say, and academics are not paid for being just anybody. There are also, however, political and institutional reasons ...”