“... and devoted to his two daughters, he alienated wife and children by an air of cold hostility. He took his current work in progress with him on holidays and brooded about it while drinking heavily, and the ‘new start’ to his marriage envisaged when he became a freelance writer, was abandoned within weeks. The new start involved stopping work at ...”

“... hundred years old.’ The college plumbing was also pretty ancient. Ved shivered in his room but took comfort in the knowledge that Harold Macmillan had shivered there before him. (One day Macmillan dropped into his old quarters and found Mehta stretched out on a sofa. ‘He must think that the college has gone to the dogs.’) Would Ved’s co-students also ...”

“... begin at under £22,000. It is worth recalling that when the great wage-inflation of the Seventies took many Labour voters into the tax net for the first time, the 1974-79 Labour Government discovered that they objected to paying higher taxes to help the worse-off. The Labour Party might find the same thing happening. They might also find that many of their ...”

“... In 1507 Damian, Abbot of Tungland – variously known as ‘the Italian’ or ‘Master John, the French leech’ – undertook to fly from Scotland to France. ‘To that effect he had a pair of wings made from feathers. When they were fastened to him, he flew from the castle walls of Stirling, but at once fell to the ground and broke his ...”

“... and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and encouraged the ...”

“... soldiers knocked on the door and killed her uncle, aunt and two cousins. The murders, which took place during the ferocious violence of the German retreat, seem to have been intended as a reprisal for Albert Einstein’s existence – her uncle was Einstein’s cousin. She and her twin sister, whose surname wasn’t Einstein and didn’t sound ...”

“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”

“... with the female lead is offset only by his boundless greed; a blind judge, the famous Sir John Fielding, who is widely believed to have been deceived by the enchanting villainess, despite his legendary reputation for discerning innocence or guilt in the voices of defendants; a rich and gullible Jewish sugar-daddy who attracts hints of anti-semitism; a ...”

“... quite accepted. Lewis’s recommendation of them was a poisoned chalice for critics, since he took them as myth rather than literature, and regarded the actual words, which involve much archaism, some archness, and a tendency to capitalise Life and Love and Death, as ‘almost an accident’. Epigraphs from Goethe, Novalis, Schiller and Schleiermacher do ...”

“... Sophoclean lines: Creon forbade the burial of Polynices; Antigone, and Polynices’s wife Argeia, took up the body by night and put it on Eteocles’s pyre; when the guards surprised them, Argeia escaped, Antigone was captured; Creon handed her over to Haemon, with orders to kill her. But then:Haemon, in the grip of love, disregarded his father’s orders. He ...”

“... in decades. He is straight out of a 1950s sitcom as All-American Dad: beloved teacher, coach who took the losing high school football team to the state championship, long-term military man, hunter and fisherman, star of YouTube videos where he fixes his car or talks about the importance of cleaning out the gutters on your house. Yet he has also been perhaps ...”

“... of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who built a boat to preserve his family and the birds and beasts he took on board. The first bird released after six days of floods ‘flew to and fro but found no resting place’. The similarity between this text and the narrative of the Flood in Genesis caused a sensation after the tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at ...”

“... On​ 12 December 1884, Henry James took a break from writing the novel that would be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and is a cause of his undoing, as he becomes lost in a London filled with social venom and anarchist plots ...”

“... the water’ had never heard of it. Those who wanted to see it for themselves mostly took the steamer from Liverpool. The crossing is notoriously rough and lasts 11 hours, which half the boat spend knocking it back and the other half throwing it up. This leaves Belfast facing a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never ...”

“... practitioners, with his own assistants, and not least with his own even more eminent brother, John. Hunter proffered a sinister materialistic explanation for the anatomists’ psychic violence: ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects, may render them less able to bear contradiction.’ No finer case exists of just that psychological ...”