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“... was born on 14 January 83, his brothers Gaius and Lucius soon after that, but their father died young, before he was old enough to run for consul. We know nothing of Antony’s youth or early career, but he would have received the education of any good Roman aristocrat and he became a fine if florid orator himself. His mother swiftly remarried, to Publius ...”

“... on the changes I have seen. The most considerable change has only just occurred to me. When I was young we all believed in Progress and so did a couple of generations before us. We followed the guidance of Dr Coué and chanted in unison: ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’ Progress was a watertight guarantee that, despite temporary ...”

“... Michael Ryan’s memoir, Secret Life, is a book essentially unthinkable before the triumph of the therapeutic in contemporary American life. By virtue of its core subject-matter – the consequences of Ryan’s sexual molestation when he was five and what he terms his subsequent ‘sexual addiction’ as an adult – it raises the ante enormously in the matter of sexual revelation and explicitness ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... have sat in the church where I was once an altar girl.In the opening chapter of The Pilgrimage, Michael and his wife, Julia, sit in their living room with Father Victor, the local priest, and Michael’s nephew Jim, a doctor. The group is organising a pilgrimage to Lourdes, a destination not only spiritually enlightening ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... Give me chastity and continence, prayed the youthful Augustine, but do not give it yet. Perhaps the young Tony Benn, slithering up the greasy poll, made similar entreaties. For this, his fascinating first volume of diaries, is the story of an attractive, vital, boundlessly energetic young man having the egocentric time of his life without a thought for the morrow, except to move onwards and upwards ...”

“... justice. Or it’s the way you justify your wishes, make them part of what the world owes you. The young Frank Kermode ‘wasn’t entitled’ to be his father’s boy because he was so unhandy and so unathletic. His sister’s arrival deprives him of ‘the excessive maternal care I had once felt myself entitled to for ever’. When he falls and breaks an ...”

“... was an accommodating Old Etonian called Jim Shelley. Their commercial property manager was Michael Hutchings, a young eccentric known as ‘the man with the golden nose’ – a reference not only to his ability to sniff out a nice little earner in the property market, but also to his highly-developed taste for ...”

“... her a tendency to melancholia that was deepened by their mutual distrust and dislike. When very young, she stole a bottle of chloroform with the notion of killing herself. As she grew up she turned more to the informal intimacy of the servants’ quarters. ‘She would take refuge in the laundry and curl up among the sheets and tablecloths,’ Jeanne ...”

“... would be a fine comic set-piece), seems to have got exceptionally lucky. She meets a handsome young diplomat with a vast new house in Marin County, tells him a pack of lies about herself – her late husband was a surgeon, they had no children, she is a practised interior designer – and is on her way to marrying him when a chance encounter with ...”

“... respectively. The film opens with an intimate introduction to what isn’t quite the cinema. A young woman walks towards us, reading some notes she holds in her hand. She is accompanied by a film crew. The camera is on tracks leading down the right-hand side of the screen from back to front. The cameraman sits behind it, and the camera, at first seen ...”

“... to bully Mexicans. The amplified situation is delicately pictured at the end of the film when a young policeman opens a note Chieko has written to him, indicating that he is not to read it in her presence. We glimpse the text, but can’t read it because we don’t see it for long enough or from the right angle – and a lot of us can’t read Japanese ...”

“... period films I hadn’t seen, an elegant and slow movie about the Italian romance of a no longer young American woman played by Katharine Hepburn. It was shot entirely on location in Venice, and Rossano Brazzi as the love interest comes a distinctly poor second to the city. Lean and H.E. Bates had taken an Arthur Laurents play and reworked it thoroughly ...”

“... role in Little Caesar, although I did, like most people, pick up the reference when Raft asks young Robinson where he got the ‘cheap trick’ of tossing a coin while he is talking. He got it from Raft himself, who had made the habit his trademark long ago in Scarface. Amid such allusions – and indeed the whole show of organised crime as a sort of ...”