“... 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 ...”

“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... sense of pleasure.’She was not encouraged to think of herself as a literary celebrity. As a young woman, she wrote her novels on the sitting-room table at which her mother sewed: her family were proud of her early success, but would, she said, have felt ‘almost humiliated’ had they thought her composition required any ‘artificial aids’, such as ...”

“... to fail to acquire French a great disappointment. His friendships with such as Lady Gregory and Arthur Symons offered him only limited access to either language. Despite his wretched start and these persistent incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned Italian ...”

“... British Government chose to disregard in 1917. Some thirty years afterwards the English Zionist Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as ‘one of the most improbable documents of all times’, since in it ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. ‘Iimprobable’ the Balfour Declaration undoubtedly was, yet ...”

“... holiday. F.W. Murnau shot Nosferatu there – the place became a favourite film location – and young Leni Riefenstahl arrived to act in Arnold Fanck’s Holy Mountain. In 1928, Hitler came on a pilgrimage to see this potential bastion against England, accompanied by Goebbels and his doomed niece Geli Raubal. Meanwhile, money poured into the island, and ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... 1917, the British leadership reacted badly. ‘Were Scotland granted separate representation,’ Arthur Henderson, the party leader, argued, ‘London, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Wales, and perhaps other sections of the country differing in type, would each present a similar claim, with a great show of reason.’ Henderson (who was born in Glasgow) got his ...”

“... a fierce, authoritative denunciation of his audience: ‘Thou art the man!’ (II Samuel xii 7). Young Michael was brought up vaguely C of E (like both his parents) and did not feel that the potent Hebraic name of Nathan really belonged to him. He seems to feel that ‘race’ should be a subject for amusing fantasy, not to be taken seriously. Just at the ...”

“... about his verse. While working sporadically at the Bar, he came to know a cluster of thoughtful young women who called themselves ‘the Grecians’ and were dubbed ‘the Settee’ by the father of one of them, Mary Coleridge, ‘because they just sat and sat’. Together with Mary, Newbolt set about writing a historical thriller called The Debt of ...”

“... imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is ...”

“... that unilateral damage led to malfunction, so that the spare tyre idea was not very fruitful. Arthur Wigan had been attracted to considerations about the duality of the brain when he had attended an autopsy and observed, much to his disquiet, that when a particular skull had been opened, the brain of an apparently perfectly normal individual had one ...”

“... career is one of the great success stories of Late Victorian letters. In 1871 he was an obscure young architect’s assistant who had just published a barely passable novel, Desperate Remedies. By 1873, on the appearance of A Pair of Blue Eyes, he was enjoying an agreeable intimacy with the formidable Leslie Stephen and his charming sister-in-law, Anne ...”

“... the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased nature’. In the years of journalistic hackwork that followed he fell out with almost every editor and proprietor who employed him, and ...”

“... Appalachia (aka ‘the county’) in the mid-21st century, where the point of view belongs to a young woman called Flynne Fisher; and half in London seventy years later, seen through the eyes of a young man called Wilf Netherton. The characters in the different timeframes are able to interact with each other, but only ...”