“... be comic; there’s certainly no shortage of good material. Black’s almost manic social climbing took the peculiar form of wanting to meet famous people, hang out with them, and fill them in at great length on history and current affairs. He had an excellent memory, and was not afraid to use it. Lists of Swedish kings, Spanish ships in the Armada, minor ...”

“... his remarks on the claims of various astronomers and mathematicians. The schoolman incarnate, he took much the same line in castigating his medical colleagues. If a doctor chose to rely on Hippocrates, how good could he be if he was ignorant of the art of Criticism? Scaliger found that numbers could be harder to correct than words. But although his ...”

“... failed for sure to spare it a glance. In France, it was not so. There, the members of the Oulipo took due notice of a calendrical windfall and laid plans for some suitably reversible celebrations, such as inviting President Menem of Argentina to come and address audiences in the towns of Noyon and Laval, and ...”

“... the judges, who were wealthy members of the German-speaking elite. When an old man called Mātiss took the stand, the judges noticed that the local innkeeper, who had already been questioned, was smiling. Asked why, he replied that he was amused to see ‘Old Thiess’, his neighbour and tenant, swearing on the Bible, since ‘everyone knows he goes around ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...”

“... unaccountable power of banks and other sinister financial interests. Half a century or so after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, around 60 per cent of Americans still dissent from the official verdict that a lone gunman was responsible, though there’s no consensus about the identity of the conspirators: variously the Mafia, the CIA or Castro’s ...”

“... A more carefree mode became possible when he got away from the North. Funded by an award, he took his wife and their sons to the South of France and Spain. Though his letters aren’t in the Byron league when it comes to exotic travel, they show a keen eye for the picturesque. To the Longleys, he wrote: ‘Swallows shit from the rafters all around ...”

“... child with ‘hereditary taint’. Imagination proved an ally. To relieve periodic choking fits he took to visualising golden angels against a blue background. And there were spaces inside spaces where one might be safe. He carved a tiny mannikin, hid it beneath the attic floorboards, and for a year ritually presented the little man with miniature scrolls ...”

“... William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious controversialists, of writers on science and medicine and so on, whose names were then far more familiar than many of those I’ve ...”

“... Adair’s work will know to expect an exercise in imitation and pastiche: where Myths and Memories took off Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, and The Holy Innocents reworked Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, the new novel is a commentary on, revision of and skit on Death in Venice. It’s fun to think how much Mann would have hated Gilbert Adair’s book. While ...”

“... Gandhi and Nehru constantly visited and discussions on the strategy of the Independence struggle took place, would have been instantly familiar to Shakespeare, and indeed must have resembled every great court and power centre before the later 20th century, whether in Elizabethan England or the Versailles of Louis XIV, Kyoto or Mongol Karakorum or Victorian ...”

“... the political balance through the ballot box. The regime panicked and in 1967 the ‘Colonels’ took over. They were finally seen off in 1974 after a violent confrontation with university students. The period that followed was known as the metapolitefsi (‘change of political system’). ‘Greece belongs to the West’ – an insinuation that the only ...”

“... was no ball-throwing, no camping, no swimming, not much of anything, really, except the trips we took to fish a series of private Canadian lakes with various Native American guides. I was a spin-caster back then, more than seventy years ago. From our motorised aluminium canoe, using mostly daredevils, pikey-minnows and Abu spinners, we landed ...”

“... of his father, whose waiting-room was constantly crowded with supplicants for his services. As John Juxon suggests, the elder Lewis could have served as a model for the abrasive Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, who suspended his moral judgment when dealing with his greasy, grimy riffraff of clients – cracksmen, fences, thieves – and then, in ...”