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“... and hard to read in the photocopies. They testify to the exceptional industry and ability of the young literary journalist – he wrote a long succession of literary chronicles and reviewed large numbers of books in various languages – but it is unlikely that any degree of later eminence would have induced anybody to republish them had not their discovery ...”

“... with thatched roofs – a pre-industrial bareness in which only the gleaming automatic guns of young soldiers and the tangle of barbed wire behind which they sat spoke of the world beyond Nepal. The jittery soldiers who approached the car with fingers on their triggers were very young, hard to associate with stories I ...”

“... of exotic ‘prayer’ shawl draped over his expressive shoulders, smoking away, talking to eager young girls. Mike Nichols, the serpent in the garden … Claggart to the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of his latest ...”

“... Library was a backstage pass to where the real action was in all its sordid glamour, offering the young and privileged a vantage point in the wings, if not the royal box. There were traces too of sexual dissidence as a sort of gnosis, offering access to esoteric truths. A forbidden identity could be claimed, not in the spirit of political critique but as an ...”

“... it. He died in 1962. In his admirably perceptive introduction to the now reprinted masterpiece, Michael Holroyd comments on Hamilton’s Scottish provenance, something that had never occurred to me when I first took to him. His father had been an eccentric and a ‘character’, whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a ...”

“... on Labour’s Front Bench have to live with the oral history of folksong, and with comparison in young minds with Harry McShane, that Marxist saint who fought beside Maclean and died only recently, and with Mick McGahey, happily still with us, beaming serenely at the back of mat throng in the People’s Palace. In this context, Gordon Brown’s biography of ...”

“... History of Great Britain, no doubt because they happened to be around the house at the time. The young Thomas read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason at the age of 13 and became a lifelong freethinker: in 1925, he was to compose a foreword to the collected works of Paine. He started to lose his hearing at an early age and always said later that it helped him ...”

“... two men parted ways and in 1958 Kirby returned to Goodman’s fold, where he and Steve Ditko, a young artist who later became a reclusive follower of Ayn Rand, worked under Lee’s direction. Instead of giving them scripts to illustrate, Lee evolved the ‘Marvel Method’, which involved a quick meeting to hash out a story idea. One or other of the artists ...”

“... clear how far these went. Asquith had form as a groper. Venetia was far from being the first young woman to catch his eye – his wife Margot wrote in her diary in 1907 that her husband had a ‘little harem’, which included other society beauties such as the actress Viola Tree and Pamela Jekyll, niece of Gertrude Jekyll – but his feelings for ...”

“... and recognition for the clockmaker. The emotional tension of those chapters recalls Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. It never feels quite right to be most attached to a writer’s most famous work. But there’s something private and swift about Longitude. The Glass Universe has a more dutiful energy to it. Sobel’s other books include Galileo’s Daughter ...”

“... Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... many of them college kids of draft age, and his instinctive respect and affection for the young, often Southern, and distinctly non-collegiate soldiers of the same age, blocking the way. ‘Average pals and buddies,’ Mailer calls them, ‘“real” American teenagers’, They bring to mind his own days as a soldier in World War Two, when he was ...”

“... know that not believing in astrology is a typically Taurean trait. When I first caught a bright young friend browsing in the astrology section of a bookshop – ‘How can you believe in that rubbish?’ – he pointed to a line in the book he was holding where it was written that a Taurean would typically say: ‘How can you believe in that rubbish?’ The ...”