“... above all about the importance of a good education. The younger brother, Réné, was a brilliant pupil but Maurice’s shyness and stammer held him back. He failed the oral exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure three times and, after serving without fighting for a year during the war, went in 1941 to study in Clermont-Ferrand, the future snow-covered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the bitter end. Last autumn was one of them. In September, two people were stabbed outside the former offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. In October, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine suburb of Paris, was beheaded after he showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils during a civics class ...”

“... successfully negotiated Britain’s entry into the EEC. Both Powell and Heath concluded that the former’s lack of support cost the latter his job. In the second election of 1974, Powell went further and effectively told people to vote Labour, at that time by far the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. Powell himself stood as a candidate for the ...”

“... of passport photographs, now being recycled to promote the Super Furry Animals, is the degree of pupil dilation. Every flash in the photo-booth freezes a ‘Say No to Dope’ warning. Moustache, hair, specs, it makes no difference. Howard is still the traditionalist, the 25 spliffs a day man. Everything up to now has been a scam, why not this ...”

“... for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating,’ Fitzgerald writes of her protagonist in The Bookshop, a novel that opens on a quiet vignette of English nature: a heron swallowing an eel, the eel struggling to escape, both creatures trapped for ever because ‘they ...”

“... suspected. This ‘Le Clerc’ was not the literary celebrity he claimed to be, but an impostor: a former monk named Frédéric-Auguste Gabillon. While in England Gabillon not only fooled the clergy, whose readiness to extend charity perhaps resulted from a professional deformation: he also succeeded at the harder task of cheating a bookseller out of a ...”

“... There are a number of later copies or versions of the painting, one attributed to Reynolds’s pupil and amanuensis, James Northcote. These are inferior to the original, lacking its soft, nuanced brushwork, but make the man in the picture more palpable, more ordinary and thus more believable; but it remains uncertain that they really show us Francis ...”

“... on fire by lightning.) In the event, he went off instead to teach in China, as his most celebrated pupil William Empson was also to do, dropping in on Russia, where he met Eisenstein, and later on Japan and Korea. It is hard to imagine his piously parochial Cambridge colleague F.R. Leavis accompanying him on the Trans-Siberian railway. He also taught for a ...”

“... which has since been repeated with other relative newcomers such as, in the 1940s and 1950s, the former local colleges that granted external London degrees, or in the 1960s and 1970s with the Colleges of Advanced Technology, or again in the 1980s and 1990s with the polytechnics. The pull has always been towards being a national rather than a local ...”

“... common-sense wisdom to Johanna’s enlightened conceptualism. She has learnt most of this from a former lover, Eberhard (modelled on Otto Gross, Freud’s pupil, for whom the phrase ‘spaced-out’ – indeed all the terms of the drug culture and hippiedom – might have been coined). So she thinks you can be ...”

“... in North Cork from her dead cousin and lover, Guy Montefort. She now lives there with Guy’s former fiancée, Lilia, whom she has married off to Fred Danby, an illegitimate cousin. Fred truculently farms the estate. He and Lilia have two children, Jane and Maud. Cousins, of course, bring with them a plentiful supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could ...”

“... money spent the third.”’) Training sometimes began early. Helena Beatson, Read’s niece and pupil, presented her first narrative scenes at the age of eight at the 1771 Society of Artists show; by the time she was twelve, she was done with exhibiting. The artist Ellen Sharples had her eight-year-old daughter, Rolinda, read Catrou and Rouillé’s Roman ...”

“... the bastard child of the union? And why do the mullahs of Yorkshire so much resent a brilliant pupil who has the Angrez themselves waiting upon his dexterous and subtle annexation of their greatest and most treasured resource – their language? It can’t just be the politicisation of religion, because Rushdie long ago argued by allegory that religion ...”