“... I’ve had it packed for a week now’) as well as her unhappiness. Welles’s own mother died young (or youngish – she was 42), but she wasn’t a victim. Daughter of a prosperous Illinois coal merchant, Beatrice Welles was handsome, dynamic and indefatigably improving, reading her son Shakespeare ‘before he could speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... at that time, even more so for one from the depths of the country. St Ita’s was a place where young ladies visited museums in school hours, held classes in the garden and immersed themselves in Ireland’s Celtic culture. The girls there read Yeats and Synge as contemporary writers and steeped themselves in the myths and folklore of ancient Ireland. Above ...”

“... to a separate moral failing by which the happiness of women is undermined: love (or loving too young and too thoughtlessly), leasing (or lying) and jealousy. In fact the last two novellas form one connected story, which has been divided to make the book look like a sequel to Hogg’s earlier extraordinary romance, The Three Perils of Man. The ...”

“... the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ally. Mandelson did not declare his ...”

“... by them: the one naturally follows the other, as the overnight cell follows the police blotter. Robert Lowell was a rather unsavoury fellow; therefore we should not be surprised by the ‘irresponsible obscurity’ (Carey’s phrase) of his verse. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey moves swiftly from quoting unpleasant and fascistic comments about ...”

“... in Westminster. Among the witnessing crowd in Oxford Street was John Clare, who remembered how the young girl next to him ‘gave a deep sigh and utterd poor Lord Byron’ and reflected that ‘the common people felt his merits and his power.’ Mary Shelley watched from her window as the cortège passed through Kentish Town. Lady Caroline Lamb’s ...”

“... and mercurial and overweight and bore more than a passing resemblance, it was often remarked, to a young Hitchcock, who made several comic appearances in the novels in the guise of the boys’ reluctant sponsor. Jupiter had entered a competition and won all three of them the use of a gold-plated Rolls-Royce complete with an English chauffeur by the name of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if he does not take Communion when they go, she will suspect that he has been having sex with a young widow. Although he tries the confessional beforehand, he cannot receive absolution because he refuses to obey Father Rank’s instruction to steer clear of Helen Rolt. If he takes Communion in his state of mortal sin, then he will damn himself, but he goes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... know that the spoils of German rocket technology were unequally divided after the war: a handsome young aristocrat, Wernher von Braun, a major in the SS and the inventor of the V2 rocket, made it to the US with as many papers, instruments and scientists (118) as he could manage. (Von Braun had worked from Mittelwerk, a production factory in the Harz ...”

“... out licences, at the risk of being prosecuted as ‘pirates’. A London radio aficionado called Robert Ford began taunting the government with his illegal unlicensed radio listening. The government was initially reluctant to prosecute, but eventually his home was searched, his radio was found, and he was arrested. He insisted on being jailed, proclaiming ...”

“... writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness when he observed of Auden’s multifarious prose: ‘Much hard, ingenious, correct toil has gone into inconspicuous things: introductions, anthologies and translations. When one looks at them ...”