“... how ‘my brother and I struggled against the iron fact that my mother wasn’t there any more.’ The mother’s death is not the only event that echoes through Maxwell’s work. In another story, ‘The Holy Terror’ (1986), he writes: ‘I remembered that my mother’s only brother lost an arm in an automobile accident.’ In So Long, See You ...”

“... who was devoted to obliterating the genteel posturing of 19th-century dance by introducing a more vigorous interpretative art, wrote of Nijinsky ‘softly leaping great distances ... overflowing with an abundance of power’. Alexandre Benois, the painter, and one of the new kind of set designers courted by Diaghilev, saw the young Nijinsky as ...”

“... a Catholic, and seems never to have wavered in her faith, even visiting Lourdes in 1958 – though more, she insisted, as a pilgrim than a patient – and getting a special blessing from Pope Pius XII at a Sunday audience in Rome. She attended mass every morning, was delighted when friends such as Betty Hester were received into the faith, and thought long and ...”

“... the Serapis, commanded by Richard Pearson, and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Thomas Piercy – engaged the Americans, allowing the convoy to escape and shelter under Scarborough Castle.The battle raged for hours. Hundreds of people came out to watch. Cannon balls bounced off the cliffs. The Bonhomme Richard was slower than the ...”

“... human affairs, christened the scheme ‘Pantisocracy’. It sounds now like a comic interlude in a more serious sort of literary life; but many people (including Priestley) emigrated to America at around this time. Long before Coleridge arrived on his doorstep Southey had dreamed despondently about escaping England and starting afresh. ‘Is it not rather ...”

“... non-cognoscenti: ‘that Mistress Bare and Bald’, Coleridge enjoyed calling her in private, with more antipathy than inspiration. William McCarthy quotes the Table Talk anecdote early on in his compendious and admiring new biography of Barbauld, as though obliged to get it over with, and makes the suggestion that Barbauld had unwittingly revived ...”

“... it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original. Those who fancied themselves as scholars could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only a ...”

“... to the Crown. Preparing for the trial, the government had quickly passed a new law to make things more comfortable. For nine months at the start of the war, Joyce had ‘broadcast for the enemy’, and that was enough to finish him. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that he was hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a ...”

“... Black Death in the mid-14th century led to another drop in temperatures, as reforestation allowed more carbon dioxide to be absorbed. Certainly, by 1400 Atlantic pack ice had dramatically increased in volume, and farmers could no longer depend on warm summers. And two centuries later the planet was a chillier place than it had been for hundreds, perhaps ...”

“... which the human race shares in common’ and that, therefore, ‘no one originally has any more right to occupy a particular portion of the earth than anyone else.’ But the ideal of ‘communal possession’ was hobbled by geographical reality: the brute fact that the earth is round, which means that human beings ‘cannot spread themselves out over ...”

“... well clear of social media, but he’s a veteran of the festival circuit, the TV studio and, more recently, the podcast couch. His website describes him as the director of ‘more than sixty’ films; in fact, it’s more than seventy. And we need to add the 23 operas he has staged ...”

“... the Yiddish journal Literarishe bleter. He was also reading Schopenhauer and Hamsun, translating Thomas Mann and The Possessed. ‘I couldn’t be the sort of Jew my pious parents wanted to make of me,’ Singer later declared. ‘I couldn’t, and didn’t want to be, a non-Jew. I could live neither with, nor without, God. I aspired to the big, free ...”

“... in Dante eloquent acts, and he always suggests that within the conversations he is describing more is going on than is quite being said. The moment that best illustrates this (and it would be my poetical desert island disc for its great social delicacy) is when Dante and Virgil meet the poet Statius in purgatory. Statius explains who he is and tells Dante ...”

“... ghost. The possibility that one of these sites might fall prey to property developers generated more squeaking and gibbering in the London streets than you could shake a severed head at. Greenrooms of actors ranged anoraked bodies against the pile-drivers. Guggenheims of scholars jumboed in from North America. There was weeping and wailing and the gnashing ...”

“... unanimity of spring made way for the bitter struggle between classes.The autumn offered a more complex picture. In September, October and November, counter-revolution unfolded in Berlin, Prague, the Kingdom of Naples and Vienna. Parliaments were shut down, troops returned en masse to the streets, insurgents were arrested and sentenced. But at the same ...”