“... in the war. In Moscow, he formed a close alliance with the American Raymond Robins and a young Arthur Ransome, far the best-informed foreign correspondent in the country. Robins, a personal envoy of Woodrow Wilson’s, urged full recognition of the Bolshevik regime. Ransome, who knew the team around Lenin and had won their trust, passionately ...”

“... himself as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic because of the overstatement, as if ‘naked liberty’ could possibly be an adequate opposition to ‘security and bank-balance and power’. Stylistically, the passage is comic because it is built on contradictions: the two hate ...”

“... of things in life: politics and stuff. I don’t. Apart from when I was a child knowing that the Young Conservatives in Clapham, where I grew up, had a much better ping-pong table than Young Labour, and that made me a member of the Young Conservatives for quite a time. Priorities.GP: How ...”

“... the Ashmolean’s collection of copies of Greek antiquities, recently acquired by its keeper, Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Several objects, including a fragment of a mural showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a ...”

“... from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge. His subsequent academic career started at Selwyn College, diverted to Sydney University and ended, fifteen years on, at Wolverhampton Polytechnic: a downward mobility which Jacobson seems to have ...”

“... a gay poet before the fact. The crux of the matter is his friendship with Joseph Drake, a handsome young doctor. They met in 1813, either in Battery Park or on a ferryboat or at the Ugly Club, a bizarre institution whose members were all beautiful men but had to pretend to appreciate one another’s ugliness. In 1819, Halleck and Drake published a sheaf of ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... to a girl from the North Riding and a man who made his own greasepaints. But Stan’s father, Arthur Jefferson, did more than that: he was a theatrical entrepreneur and a writer of plays and sketches. Stan grew up in the theatre, making his first stage appearance at the Glasgow Britannia Theatre in 1906. Jefferson later spoke about what ...”

“... The test of poetry which professes to be modern’, Arthur Symons wrote in 1892, is ‘its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there.’ And what the poets see is a transformation of the human face. In the country, ‘The face of every neighbour whom I met/Was as a volume to me,’ Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, but neighbours were harder to read in London: ‘The comers and goers face to face,/Face after face ...”

“... convictions might seem cliquish or snobbish. It was a good idea to include a letter in which (Sir) Arthur Gaye, who was at Trinity with Woolf, tells Woolf bluntly that Strachey and his friends are ‘the most offensive people I have ever met, and if I had continued to meet them I would not be answerable for anything I might do.’ Much later in his life Woolf ...”

“... offers a panoramic view of Johannesburg, where an ape-like animal is at large in the suburbs. Young Stanley snaps it with his camera, a barmitzvah present. The picture is printed in a newspaper; an elderly estate agent’s wife welcomes the headlines as a distraction from worse horrors. Doctors at the golf club are convinced it is a baboon. It startles a ...”

“... With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous fascination’ with the detailed preparation. He caught the mood of the moment. ‘No one can measure the consequences,’ he recorded; ‘we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance ...”

“... of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she owned tapestries, sculptures, paintings (including Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait) and a library of nearly four hundred books. Her maids of honour came from all over Europe. In a letter to ...”

“... came a question from the audience. What did I think was the biggest mistake the New Left made? If young radicals wanted to reach the ‘masses’, I replied, they should connect means to ends and refrain from abusing the symbols of American patriotism. The American New Left was almost unique in turning against America’s own patriotic heroes and ...”

“... in Gay’s view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young lady of 16 who in 1885 was keeping an artless private record at St Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I ...”