“... and set the second half of his dialogues On the Ends of Good and Evil in the family library of his young friend Lucullus, which he hoped would equip the boy for public life. Medieval monks were fervent bibliophiles. In their cupboards, worn, faded manuscripts of the Latin classics and the Church Fathers flanked brand new Bibles and commentaries, beautifully ...”

“... In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This ...”

“... dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The ...”

“... who insisted on being identified), but the key facts are the same. Essentially, it involves the young Owen taking a job as a navvy during his university vacation in the autumn of 1956, and discovering that the good old British working chap is pretty patriotic and doesn’t take kindly to being shoved around by wogs like Colonel Nasser. He records that ...”

“... humanity weep at these painful separations from everything, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it.’ Jackson was the son of an Ulster immigrant driven out of Ireland by English injustice, and he was speaking to the sons and daughters (and grandsons and granddaughters) of other immigrants, who knew what he ...”

“... the potential enemy’s economic strength were based on the sort of calculation that writers like Robert Conquest have long criticised. According to a memorandum submitted by the Economic Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in April 1946, for instance, Soviet industrial output would exceed that of the rest of Europe by 1960 and overtake that of the ...”

“... was busy with Gazza-saving schemes right to the end. Unluckily, his only source of finance was Robert Maxwell: another good reason for Sugar, Rupert Murdoch’s friend, to have moved in when he did. Irving Scholar is now seen as a typical loadsamoney illusionist of the Eighties, and is taken to be the architect of all Spurs’ financial cock-ups in that ...”

“... rapid technological advance, and Beadle could usefully have made more of this. The generations too young to have attended Woodstock have lived through the years of space travel, the advent of CDs and Virtual Reality, the innovations in art and design made possible by computer graphics and so on. Meanwhile, the irony of the entrenched position of rock’s ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... takeovers and wished us the best of luck, while in another we were received by a team of beady young screen-watchers who might as well have been wearing tee-shirts blazoned with ‘I short-termism.’ But we still had to be sure of getting our message across as best and wherever we could. And that brought us face to face once again with the familiar ...”

“... His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a local pub in which Chatwin, looking up ‘as a young farmhand came in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings ...”

“... of that time for the benefit of readers who may misremember it as well as those who are too young to remember it for themselves. Both writers devise a rhetorical strategy for their rescue missions. Donald adopts the methods of empiricist historiography, withholding so far as possible his own comments on the events of Wolfe’s life and restricting his ...”

“... Nancy thought him thick, and was determined that he should be swapped for one of the brilliant young men she was meanwhile collecting for weekends at Cliveden, the gigantic Astor château on the Thames. Pennant died in the trenches in 1915, leaving Phyllis shattered but free to find a beau ‘in intellectual circles’. Nancy recruited her circle from Lord ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... a past as a psychopathic bandit leader, ‘Satan Joao’, and a sudden repentance to match that of Robert the Devil in the old story which has been his favourite as a child (a story, like ‘St Julien l’Hospitalier’, full of the melodramatic and possibly not spurious appeal of its provision for saving discontinuities, abrupt redemptions in damned ...”