“... Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was eleven before he could read fluently and at twenty he wrote like a child’. Instead, Roberts shows us a youth, not brilliant perhaps, but ...”

“... young man about fifteen years of age, of active, studious and erotic disposition’, a star pupil at his school, who had been much troubled by sexual urges until he discovered to his delight the expedient of masturbation. For about a year he had masturbated two or three times a day. But he then became worried by certain supposed symptoms of ill-health ...”

“... the medical director of having aimed too high, too quickly, and of having bewildered his unhappy pupil by allowing him to see his exasperation.’ Publishing that sentence in 1971 doubtless required a cushion of arrogance about Sartre’s own reputation in the year 2096. Yet perhaps this arrogance is not quite what it seems. There are times – many times ...”

“... a different title. Dunning, who teaches sociology at the University of Leicester, was once a pupil of Elias; he remains a devotee, but the focus of his interests is rather different. Elias originally used the history of changing styles in what he calls ‘sport-games’ (defined in a footnote as ‘football, rugby, tennis, cricket, golf etc’) to ...”

“... from the blue, so to speak, came the ‘Sixties’, first in Indonesia, then in Chicago. In the former, political polarisation had been steadily deepening in the second half of the Fifties, very much along the faultlines acutely analysed in The Religion of Java. The country’s first and only free elections were held in 1955, and showed a vast new ...”

“... locating their obscurity in the mystery of inwardness. The phrase belongs to William Rubin, the former curator of 20th-century painting and sculpture at MoMA, but the tradition extends back to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Braque and Picasso’s dealer, who offered his own accounts of Cubism in terms derived from Kantian metaphysics. That tradition, Clark ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”