“... required’. For his son, public school, at Sherborne, was followed by four years reading, or more often not reading, classics at Oxford from 1923 to 1927. Friendships formed at Oxford in the 1920s seem so pervasive in the literary life of interwar Britain that we may be in danger of forgetting how small the actual numbers were: Day-Lewis was one of just ...”

“... dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages’. The context of this passage is a harebrained scheme to freeze sound by the Frigicom process, using liquid nitrogen, so that noise pollution can be frozen at source and disposed of safely at sea. These books have safely been turned ...”

“... Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered Antwerp, drained, estranged from ...”

“... Tenth also showed up at various times. The First and the Ninth came back at season’s end, while Thomas Hampson sang the complete Mahler songs. Each of the major works, then, was performed at least once, and it wasn’t even an anniversary year. Beethoven’s little things, by contrast, received, by my count, seven performances – by the Philharmonic and by ...”

“... say republican, education at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, where he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger contemporary of Lamb and Coleridge. John and Leigh Hunt brought a new idealism to English journalism when they launched the Examiner in 1808. At a time when most polite journals were still tied to the ...”

“... read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I give you my word, I shou’d have been much more reserved both in that and in the other letters I wrote to her … I shall write to her for the future as I preach to my Congregation, good wholesome serious sound matter, such as may please the eye of a watchful Parent. Private letters were often read aloud ...”

“... writing, had himself rigorously and regularly and most redundantly bled, and refrained from eating more than would keep a starving man alive. Keats had trained in surgery, treated consumptive patients and nursed first his mother during the consumption that killed her and then his brother Tom. Though not well understood or treatable, the symptoms of what we ...”

“... have as rich a tale of human relations and mental worlds as any reader or viewer could stomach. We more or less know about Nietzsche, but Elisabeth, the little sister and living embodiment of everything the mad philosopher disdained, who took control of her brother’s thought, should not on any account be overlooked. Her life is a story of mediocrity ...”

“... as ‘some specimen cases’ (as one entry from 1863 has it): ‘In one of the hospitals I find Thomas Haley, company M, 4th New York cavalry – a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness – shot through the lungs – inevitably dying – came over to this country from Ireland to enlist – has not a single friend or acquaintance ...”

“... policies, Adam Smith would have recoiled. The social policy he sought to develop was more civilised than anything on offer today from the Howards and the Heseltines, the Portillos and the Lilleys. To be fair to them, most of the Peterhouse School have chosen to expose skeletons in liberal or left-wing cupboards rather than attempt to exhume a ...”

“... possible for him to play the injured party in public.His resignation speech as prime minister – more accurately, a speech promising to stay on as caretaker until the Tory Party elects his successor, a process which could stretch to the end of summer – came after two days during which his administration collapsed around him (there were 62 resignations in ...”

“... must energetically gear himself up to the marital state. His bride would expect him to present a more sociable face to a wider world, to act at ease in mixed company, and to improve everything from his manners to his taste to fit her aspirations. In all likelihood, this would involve a new house, the marital home, or at least a decorative clean ...”

“... shall I get out of this labyrinth?’ Or perhaps invented by an imitator of Borges, someone more dedicated to the explicit and the theatrical – a Borges deeply involved with the European Romantics. Bolivar is almost too much of a good thing for a novelist, and Garcia Marquez never quite decides what to do with him. He avoids the deadpan ironies of his ...”

“... has accordingly been gaining ground. Most significant, in Parliamentary by-elections it has polled more votes than either the Conservative or Labour Parties. There is no over-publicised Alliance bandwagon, as in the winter of 1981-2, but there is a new solidity and stability to the support which it can now mobilise. The obvious conclusion is that the Alliance ...”

“... sterility’ (though he at least had the hardihood to go and see them for himself); in 1826 Noel Thomas Carrington accused them of ‘shaming the map of England’ with their barrenness. Such was the outsider’s or townsperson’s notion of the moors, expanded to a visionary plane by Shakespeare in Macbeth and King Lear. The weather on the heath ...”