“... or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion or ideology. Which put the young of the Fifties at a disadvantage, especially as they were so small a generation. ‘There were so few of you,’ one of Sayre’s professors recalled nostalgically in 1969, the year of the Harvard strike, ‘it was easy to push you around.’ No wonder ...”

“... the agreement still held. By now the Serbs had drifted away from the discussion and the crowd of young Albanians seated on the ground around him weren’t so sure. ‘They are all deeply involved with the police so they want to leave,’ they said of the Serb villagers. ‘Two Serbs with flak jackets came to the shop and drank beer – we did not stop ...”

“... race.’ ‘This calm declaration of a dying man was so well calculated to do mischief,’ wrote Robert Southey, who was among the crowd that morning. It convinced Southey that ‘revolution must inevitably come, and in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with France had ground towards a costly and ...”

“... leap from empty hedonism to murderous heroism is also a recurring theme in the biographies of the young men who leave Bradford, Hamburg, Paris and Oslo for Syria. As Borchgrevink writes, Breivik’s hatred of Islam didn’t prevent him from proposing a tactical alliance with al-Qaida against the liberal state he hated even more. The desires that motivated him ...”

“... which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... which he took to, thanks to Chinatown, the opaque glamour of whose cultural life was just what the young doctor would have ordered for himself – how right that the apprentice Exote should first have been turned in a sinological direction by the sight of Chinese life in its export version. In May 1903, Gauguin died, and three months later, Segalen’s ship ...”

“... Debutante’, conjures up the atmosphere of paternal tyranny and filial insubordination. Its young heroine, Lucretia, likes to play with her rocking horse, Tartar, even though her father (‘the bastard’) has forbidden it; when he catches her, he throws Tartar into the fire, producing ‘the most frightful neighing … as if an animal were suffering ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... sitting by the fire during the damp Irish nights, he liked to tell us boys – my sister was too young to listen – anecdotes about Parnell, whom he admired; and tales of junks and pirates, in which he escaped from brigands or captured prizes. Such images were too vivid to last, their over-bright tints fading into the dimness of nursery-stories that ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... country by Clinton’s attempt to draw a veil of secrecy over his unconsummated fumblings with a young woman who was not his wife. In the end, overkill underperformed. The impeachment ship went to pieces, flags flying, on the obstinate reef of public opinion. The country did not swallow, for instance, the Republicans’ outlandish claim that a President who ...”

“... whole world is turning into one big market for merchandise.’ In Amman in 1995, he meets a young man who hands him a business card reading ‘Jihad al-Wazir, Managing Director, World Trade Centre, Gaza, Palestine’. His father was Abu Jihad, commander of Palestinian military operations on the West Bank. On meeting him, Friedman thought to ...”

“... front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro ...”

“... to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 campaign to ‘liquidate Stone’ (the young historian Lawrence Stone), he composed what was later described as ‘one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another’. Victims constantly used the word ‘malicious’ about his choice of language, and Trevor-Roper himself often ...”