“... of being a poseur and playboy who neglected his work. It was only in 1895, when Burroughs died young (he and Wellcome hadn’t spoken in five years), that Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to ...”

“... In 1802​ , the young Humphry Davy introduced his first full course of chemistry lectures at the Royal Institution by addressing the fear that science was a Trojan horse for social or political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done ...”

“... often unpredictable, as many traders discovered to their cost. When the American captain Gideon Young shipped two tonnes of the medicinal sea plants known as ‘squills’ to Brown & Ives in Rhode Island, the merchants could not sell them. Having paid the burdensome tariff levied on all such imports, Brown & Ives re-exported the plants that hadn’t already ...”

“... second book, another novella, The Book of Words (2007), is the monologue of a disturbed young woman who jumps between childhood memories and adult retrospection. Her account of a bourgeois upbringing in an unnamed hot country, where her blue-eyed parents teach her traditional German songs, is interrupted by grotesque, apparently hallucinated ...”

“... which until then had had a near romantic intensity. In 1996, Tversky died, suddenly and young, of malignant melanoma; the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Kahneman for both men’s research.Today Kahneman is better known than Tversky. But neither would have become famous without the other. Before the 1970s, Kahneman worked largely on ...”

“... have, however, was Patrick Vieira. Before Wenger arrived at Arsenal, he told the club to buy this young, unknown central midfielder from AC Milan. Arsenal were down 1-0 at home to Sheffield Wednesday on 16 September 1996 when, in the 28th minute, Vieira came on for his debut, replacing the injured Ray Parlour. Arsenal went on to win 4-1. According to Dennis ...”

“... too far: as he rounds up her livestock in payment of a claim, she grabs his cloak and her two young sons, nobodies with no money or power, wound him mortally. Everywhere else in Europe they would all have swung on a gibbet. In Iceland they got off with losing their farm; but Einarr didn’t get it (they’d lost it already) – the gothar in general must ...”

“... he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman compounded equally of beauty, vulgarity and spite, has fallen on hard times. He has lost his healing gifts, is living alone in a Notting Hill basement, and working as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... Parini observes that ‘Like so many gifted writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost among the most prominent of them – Steinbeck could not accommodate himself to the academic grid and grind.’ Were Parini to describe Steinbeck pissing, doubtless we should be told that Shakespeare and Milton were also in the habit of passing water ...”

“... in the 1790s. What channels led to the public stage of science? What kinds of role did talented young men have to adopt? What rhetoric did they memorise, what masks did they sport in science’s version of Room at the Top? We get off on the wrong foot, Outram insists, if we accept the fashionable view that the scientific milieu created by the French ...”

“... frogs, the briar grows thicker and thicker round the rose. Sometimes the authority he claims is Robert Lowell’s: They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose. There are also poems – ‘On Not Being Milton’ and ‘The Rhubarbarians’ – in which, enjoying a bit of rough stuff, he plays the ...”

“... it was merely an appendix to the country, the future was in the hands of the thousands of bright young men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it ...”

“... offered but carping to his diary. Butlers are still more than a stage property and there are young men ‘in white waistcoats smoothing their sleek hair and pulling on their white gloves’. Not all is glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in ...”

“... the cosmopolitan striver-turned-mogul who was BP’s chief executive from 1995 until 2007, when a young ex-boyfriend sold the story of their relationship to the Mail on Sunday and Browne resigned. (He has since headed the Browne Review of higher education, which called for the lifting of the cap on tuition fees last October.) The organisation he inherited was ...”