“... flight of the mind takes him to famous poems like Paradise Lost, once famous poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45), and less familiar works such as Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). He ends with a chapter on Baroque painted ceilings.Celestial ascent at death is an ancient idea. In its earliest known ...”

“... soirée with him on the Kurfürstendamm which culminates when‘Let me be the first,’ he said, and he bent over nimbly, put his fingertips to the floor and then his knees, and raised his powerful buttocks to me. ‘Come on, fuck-head,’ he said, ‘this is your chance. Hit it big. Come in me, before I come back in ...”

“... the holder of one of the three great offices of state, the Home Secretary, could be founded on Sir Edward Coke’s assertion of the sovereignty of the courts in the face of the Crown’s prerogatives, and on Wilkes’s recovery of punitive damages from an earlier Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, for the unlawful issue of a general warrant. A former jobbing ...”

“... available guests, though: Bette Bourne, best known then for appearances with the troupe Bloolips, said yes, and so did two members of La Gran Scena Opera Company. We were hoping for a certain amount of technical discussion, perhaps even scraps of a masterclass, and had borrowed a screen from one of the Grassmarket’s antique shops in case our performers felt ...”

“... Stein admired both Pétain and Franco and had a lifelong aversion to Franklin Roosevelt.) That said, both couples shared the same fundamentally sophisticated outlook on art and life: a love of irony, archness and artistic mischief, and a commitment to modernity in all its forms.All the more stark, then, the contrast in their war experiences. Malcolm begins ...”

“... an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they said, “We’re going to privatise the NHS,” they’d be kicked out the next day.’ The Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto promised: ‘We are stopping the top-down reconfigurations of NHS ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... there is no moment when his father is fully evoked, no moment when anything particular is said about who Sir William Wilde was, and what he did, nothing about how his own search for fame has strange echoes with events in the life of his son, nothing about how Oscar Wilde emerged not, like Jay Gatsby, from his Platonic conception of himself, but from a ...”

“... difficult to take seriously: that utterance has primacy, that the sequence in which things get said is the only one there is, just as the dream is the dreamer’s account of the dream. There is no other scene of telling, and although there may be gaps and hesitations there is no such thing as a digression. Freud told the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister that ...”

“... Sometimes to re-create a colourful milieu, as with the unusual hunting novelist Mrs Edward Kennard, who at 50 in 1900 was a keen auto-mobilist: ‘Reviewers liked her slapdash, highly ungrammatical style of writing in which they discerned “lots of go” and a “thoroughly healthy tone”.’ The plots are often more or less absurd, and ...”

“... out all his satirical skill. The mixture of ventriloquism and moral insight which he showed in his Edward Pygge parodies is now employed at length to create a fast-moving circus of follies and fantasies which is an acute pleasure to read. It doesn’t matter whether you know the persons James is writing about – the particular becomes the generic in his ...”

“... responsible for Moldavia,’ she told America’s TV Guide in 1986. ‘I sat down one day and said: “I’m only going to be on the show a year and I’m going to end it with a shoot-out in Moldavia.”’ Did she know that Moldavia was a real place which would gain its independence just five years after the wedding was filmed? Did she dream up the name ...”

“... he wrote on 28 July 1914. Germany he saw as the ultimate bulwark against Russian barbarism. ‘Sir Edward Grey has betrayed us,’ he wrote on 5 August 1914. On this issue, shattered though he was at the time, he came to change his mind. In Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) he saw the war as having ‘been fought on the principles of Fox and Grey’, and in ...”

“... to say nothing that the author does not also wish to say of Huxley – or that might not also be said of that Scottish labourer-turned-geologist, Hugh Miller, whose rising through the ranks may have predisposed him towards progressive creation but emphatically not to any theory of evolution. These are, however, minor discomforts in a book which, although not ...”

“... yet in a position to reassert themselves. The real struggle was still to come. Still, it might be said that the fall of the Bastille, or the Bolshevik seizure of power, were also only starting-points. A useful series of maps, a chronological table and a glossary, help the reader to follow the deciphering of the earlier age, a palimpsest overwritten with ...”