“... is, however, all too simple: it was the fault of Lawrence’s awful mother. Her claim to be a former teacher from a genteel background was a fraud: she tormented her bluff and genial working-class husband, and forced her children to hate him; she was rightly ostracised by her neighbours for her disdainful self-righteousness; she ‘cruelly ...”

“... historian of Henry VIII’s reign, A.F. Pollard, and the consequential advice of Pollard’s pupil, J.E. Neale, whom Pollard had decades earlier directed into the adjacent Elizabethan period. Some of the questions which presently emerged arose in the purest Eltonian fashion through reconstituting the archive in that original integrity which Victorian ...”

“... study medicine, but had been told that he’d be cut off if he did. Hegel eventually persuaded a former student of his in Brussels to enlist the boy in the Dutch Army. Ludwig went to the East Indies and there died, at 24, without his father ever hearing. He always wondered what the connection had been between ‘Mr Hegel’ and ‘my dear mother’. Ludwig ...”

“... work called Colonial Elites and a masterly study of Tacitus, in two large volumes. The former work, dealing with Spain and the Americas as well as Rome, showed that Syme had not forgotten his New Zealand origins, which have been as useful to him as his experience in the Hampshire Militia was to Gibbon. In his Tacitus, Syme’s command over the ...”

“... which historians concerned with later periods could profitably follow – Mommsen’s most eminent pupil was Max Weber – Housman persevered in the 18th-century mode of confining himself to textual criticism. The masterly commentary that accompanies his edition of Manilius is wholly concentrated on the establishment of the text. Brink tells again the familiar ...”

“... Gray went on holiday with his family to the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde. He was 16, a pupil at Whitehill Senior Secondary School in Glasgow, brilliant at art and English but also an awkward boy, asthmatic and eczematous, happier in his head: ‘Had there been television I would have become an addict. In those days my greed for extravagant ...”

“... but full of life and youthful vigour … The number of her children is greater than in any former age.’ And it would still be vigorous in a distant future when travellers from New Zealand, ‘in the midst of a vast solitude’, would stand ‘on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s’. The translator of the ...”

“... decide whether it is doing social history or doing ‘good art’ – the catalogue plumps for the former – and it doesn’t succeed in doing either, all of the time. But it can’t help being interesting. On their first visit to London – they both arrived in 1870, in September and December respectively, and were gone by mid-1871 – Monet, who lodged off ...”

“... her funeral he supposes Ruth, who also attends, to be the dead woman. Ruth now owns Mary’s former dwelling, and here she brings Bobbo on his eventual release from prison. Sometimes she lets him sleep with her and sometimes – but only for the pleasure of humiliating him – she sleeps with her manservant. It is a matter of power. ‘I have all, and he ...”

“... tone), but powerful. Locke passed his intellectual curiosity about the powers of enthusiasm to his pupil, the young Anthony Ashley Cooper, who was to become 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury had Locke as his private tutor for the early years of his education and was to call him his ‘foster-father’. Locke had been at the right hand of his ...”

“... in his verse, Trakl was concerned with the irresolvable conflict between idyll and reality, the former conceived as a dream, the latter as fallen, sick and evil. ‘Feeling at moments of deathlike being: all human beings are worthy of love. Waking you feel the bitterness of the world; therein lies all your unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect ...”

“... Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because as I’ve recently discovered, a source other than Alexander Selkirk’s narrative stirred Defoe’s imagination, and points to the ...”

“... worked at Collins and at Chatto, as well as being an editor-at-large at the Literary Review and a former deputy editor of the London Magazine. He has written well-received biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, and has already published three volumes of autobiography, the last entitled Grub Street Irregular. Now he has written a book which is, the ...”

“... counter-revolution was beaten back in the west – the popular leader of the Vendée, the former carter Cathelineau, ‘Saint of Anjou’, fell in the attempt to storm it – and in its wake the Terror was most ferocious: at night, in the noyades, thousands were drowned in the river by the Jacobin emissary Carrier. Under the Restoration, the solitary ...”

“... people in various stages of cancer treatment aren’t a group anyone wants to be a part of. My former mother-in-law went to the Bristol centre for alternative cancer therapy and in between juicing fields-worth of carrots, complained until her own death about the letters she regularly received from spouses, informing her that one of their group had ...”