“... what it means to know it well; those who, in their day, did know it well were ready to appoint a young man with a record of academic failure to the most influential Latin chair outside Oxford and Cambridge. He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal ...”

“... calls them up are they recognised as such. Paradise has to be lost before it can be gained. The young Buddhists couldn’t enjoy themselves catching fish, but they used to watch the Christian children fishing from the river-bank. Nor could they properly catch bait for their friends, though they might, speechlessly and as it were absent-mindedly, point out ...”

“... Irish magazines provided a public forum for the emergent nation. For every priest enacting Stephen Dedalus’s vision in Ulysses of a never-ending Mexican wave of elevations, consecrations and consumptions of the host (‘Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx. Dringadring!’), there will always be a subeditor on a paper like Mr ...”

“... with the exception of the angelic figure in the curious drawing known as The Dreamer. A naked young man sprawls dreamily. In the air above there hovers – upside down, almost vertical, wings spread – a smaller and rather chubby naked figure, blowing a trumpet downwards in the direction of the sprawler’s ear. The overt iconography, Dr Liebert ...”

“... innocence of childhood; and have great mountain tumults and sonorities in adolescence and young manhood; and afterwards there are the slow fertile turnings of maturity, when the river becomes ever deeper and wider; until at last it empties itself into the bitter immensity of death, the ocean of the end? And by an extension of the metaphor, the river ...”

“... garden of Ruth’s childhood home. It is a huge, dilapidated structure, in whose sinister pit the young child was placed by her father (‘To cool me off’); it is also the place where the father was neglected and left to die, after a shooting accident, by his implacable wife. But when the ‘ice-house’ returns metamorphosed, as a tomb in the Egyptian ...”

“... issue at hand, which is the relative strength of the moral claims made on us by human infants and young children. It is to this matter alone that McMahan wants us to direct our moral intuitions, and his case is constructed so as to clear the scene of any other potentially polluting concerns. This kind of disagreement about the value of thought-experiments in ...”

“... and even managed to gain the disapproval of his old primary school teacher who, according to Stephen Gilbert, admired his final interview but was not pleased when ‘he said “God the old bugger” ... I didn’t like that.’ It was such a successful finale that I still expect the credits to roll and Potter to pop up again to instruct us not to assume ...”

“... jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole). This post-war Paris is largely made up ...”

“... Fernande had been the second wife of Yourcenar’s proud father, Michel de Crayencour: the young daughter subsequently enjoyed sisterly or motherly relationships with her father’s ‘mistresses or quasi-mistresses and later his third wife’. As a septuagenarian in 1974, Yourcenar noted that she was more than twice as old as Fernande had been in ...”

“... your love dressed all in white, but come back only from the grave. The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but ...”

“... handsomest-bodied man in Europe’ – and the 48-year-old king’s liking for beautiful young men was well known. Buckingham was dangled before the king like a ‘piece of sexual bait’, and James bit. The current favourite, Sir Robert Carr, a flaxen-haired Scot, prevented Buckingham from being immediately parachuted into intimacy as a gentleman of ...”

“... on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet ...”

“... running away. The soldiers order the shopkeepers to clear away a barricade hurriedly assembled by young protesters. Teargas lingers in the air, but the incident is over. It is a typical day in Gaza, except that no one appears to have been killed or injured in the confrontation between the over-equipped Israeli Army of occupation and the Palestinians who want ...”

“... into her past and there are swarms of peripheral characters. Some (like the Dutchman with whom the young Liz made love on a Channel ferry in a force nine gale) cross the novel several times, but one never has the sense that this is a small world. Like the novel, it sprawls. Each of the leading trio of heroines has a brush with the dark side: madness, child ...”