“... self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the black kids, who belongs to the ...”

“... from what he perceives to have been the failed honeymoon: Friday evg. I dined with my Harvard pupil Eliot & his bride. I expected her to be terrible, from his mysteriousness, but she was not so bad. She is light, a little vulgar, full of life . . . He is exquisite & listless; she says she married him to stimulate him, but finds she can’t do ...”

“... and betters in the field. This accords closely with what’s known of his boyhood. The son of a former miner, now the Labour councillor for East Worksop on Bassetlaw District Council, and a dinner lady at a Worksop school, Entwistle was intelligent, well-mannered and conformable. The family were said to keep themselves very much to themselves. As such dull ...”

“... I was not anticipating the ring of the doorbell. 16 December: I was reading The Philosopher’s Pupil and visiting my own student upstairs. Munira took my 40 chapter summaries, flicked through them, yawned, and switched on the TV. ‘What is a workhouse?’ I tried to explain about the English Poor Law, but her expression glazed; she had never heard of ...”

“... and carry this into the Sistine Chapel.Today Hope is walking around with one giant David Bowie pupil, the better to see Italy with. We are looking for gifts and, in particular, a rosary for my mother. We find nothing until in one shop we find everything. In the front window hang glimmering tin and silver body parts – ex voto. Hope buys a leg for her ...”

“... large numbers now emerge from it scarcely literate. Although France still spends more on a pupil in its lycées (for the first time outclassed, except at the very highest level, by private schools) than it does on a student at its universities, it has one of the lowlier rates of reading in the OECD. Scientific research, measured by funding or by ...”

“... and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s ...”

“... committee, whose members included the head of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice, a former Treasury economist who is a member of the UK Competition Commission, and a banker; one of the two university vice-chancellors on the committee had also worked in the engineering industry. Their report was due in the summer of 2010, after the election. But ...”

“... tells of a creative-writing teacher in an American university who is informed happily by a pupil, as he finishes his fiction, ‘I’m just putting the symbols in’; there are moments in the two early tragedies (the arrows shot at the gods in Titus, the golden statues in Romeo) when we feel that the symbols are being put in. Hamlet is something else ...”

“... and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better indigenous pedigree, had the last word. A figure like Widmerpool might have something in common with denizens of Balzac or Gide, but was reassuringly overlaid with the homely watermarks of Billy Bunter and Colonel von Stumm: ‘Mr Powell ...”

“... of the city where sufferers were usually consigned. Later, teaching at Magdalen, I had as a pupil an irritating, distracted boy who would arrive two hours late for tutorials or ignore them altogether, and if he did turn up with an essay it would be sixty or seventy pages long. When I complained about him in pretty unfeeling terms, one of the fellows ...”

“... relative and let her know she was ill.Acker grew up in Sutton Place in Manhattan, and was a star pupil at the Lenox School, at that time ‘the only “white glove” Upper East Side private girls’ school that was widely open to Jews’. Classmates remember her as academically brilliant – ‘Modern Library editions of ...”

“... parents’, somewhere in ‘the tens of thousands’. Assume it takes £4000 per annum to have a pupil in the UK state system and posit a low figure of 60,000 irregular children, to produce £240 million.Nonetheless, there is a demand in the UK for irregular migrant labour which, if it weren’t met, would result in social costs – absence of care for the ...”

“... the national movement under the Raj was concerned, there was far less distance between mentor and pupil than the contrast in their cultural backgrounds might have suggested.Gandhi did not claim much book learning. In London, he had found his legal textbooks full of interest – a manual on property law ‘read like a novel’ – but Bentham too difficult to ...”

“... the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr Simpson. A former maths teacher at the school, he now suffers from Parkinson’s disease and he said he found it difficult to settle and remember things. Mr Simpson sat in a high-backed chair wearing purple pyjamas. His living-room was small but it housed a great many ...”