“... Whether or not ‘change is … the most imperative of human needs,’ as he later suggested to a young woman with whom he was sufficiently intimate to arouse his wife’s jealousy, there is no question that changeableness was the very essence of William James. The other and more acerbic Alice James (his sister) privately termed him ‘a blob of ...”

“... Faithfully’ (‘Sincerely’ only after a named ‘Dear’ – I learned that very young), after which I squiggled an elaborate signature that bore no relation to the alphabet. In the space between I let my fingers run riot over the keys, to produce a gobbledygook body of the letter that probably made as much sense to me as most of the real ...”

“... but the poem ends:Maybe what they say is trueOf war and war’s alarms;But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.Thomas Mann comes into all this because, in a lightly sardonic spirit, Yeats took as the epigraph to his poem a phrase from Mann which MacLeish had cited on the same page as his account of Yeats’s failure to keep up to ...”

“... On the cover of Jack’s paperback there is a portrait of Alexander Montgomerie, a handsome young man, finely dressed, but his eyes and the set of his mouth suggest great inner depths, perhaps profound sorrows. Unfortunately, when one opens the book, one finds the statement: ‘As no likeness of Montgomerie has yet been discovered, the artist’s impression on the cover is based on contemporary portraits ...”

“... elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like ...”

“... which is also used to describe the dancing girls at Solomon’s court, and simply means young and nubile. Jerome translates it as virgo, adding divine authority to the virulent cult of sexual disgust that shaped Christian moral theology (the Quran, free from this linguistic trap, does not connect Mariam/Mary’s miraculous nature with moral horror ...”

“... them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young Huxley, desirous of one of the few footholds in a poorly-paid scientific profession, to the time when Owen redesigned his dinosaurs to make sure they could not possibly fit Huxley’s phylogeny. Much of the fascination of Desmond’s story stems from the ...”

“... in this edition. Those interested in creative writing may consult ‘Two Housman Torsos’ by Robert Conquest, TLS, 19 Oct. 1973. Those with a taste for highly creative writing should seek out A.E. Housman: New Poems [sic] ed. [sic] by John Edmunds, with a preface and notes by Hilary Bacon (San Francisco, 1985).Every word, bracket and comma here is so ...”

“... it shared Carthage’s fate, the better. ‘National hatred must sound forth,’ he trumpeted. ‘Young republicans should suck a hatred of the name Englishman with their mother’s milk.’ The English were ‘a populace foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear.’ It seems that he meant this last sentence all too literally, for he ...”

“... Liverpool, where Forfar was docked. It was the last contact she would ever have with her troubled young husband. 22a Woodstock Gardens Liverpool Dear Molly This is the first time I had the opportunity to write. I couldn’t send anything as I promised because I got into some trouble and got my pay stopped. I haven’t had the price of smokes since I got ...”

“... to have had a touch of Robin Hood about him, Honan does not dismiss the venerable legend that the young Shakespeare used to poach deer on the estates of local aristocrats. But for the most part Shakespeare: A Life is colourful only where the record strictly warrants it. Colouring in the record is what this book does best. Honan’s particular flair is for the ...”

“... 8 per cent of the twelve million children in England, had an active referral to the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services. In 2013-14 this figure was 157,000. Some see in this huge increase evidence of welcome attention being paid to previously disregarded problems, or they believe it demonstrates the destabilising effects of late capitalism ...”

“... dates. The first plans for the cemetery were drawn up in 1920 and finalised two years later by Sir Robert Lorimer, an architect inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and Scottish baronial architecture – nostalgia to soothe the pain of modernity. Like most such cemeteries, it is overlooked by a Cross of Sacrifice – an elongated cross usually set on an ...”

“... at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there are errors in our account – given the habits of secrecy and misinformation which prevail among British governments it could perhaps hardly be otherwise – but what ...”

“... 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last recorded utterances, all of them heretical, included the opinions that ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies to his bosom . . . he vsed him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and that ‘all they that loue not Tobacco ...”