“... calls to my parents telling them I could not cope. I went to a GP. In an extremity of panic, I took to throwing myself on the floor in front of him and hammering the carpet with my fists. I was put into a nursing home for one night and had a fit, brought on by largactil – a common enough side effect of what was then a very widely used drug. I found my ...”

“... father and, just like another resentful provincial schoolboy, Henri Beyle, the future Stendhal, took shelter in mathematics, an escape-route into abstraction, where the appeal was always to reason, never to mere domestic precedence. His hostility towards his father supplies the propellant for his curious second novel, Gueule de pierre, which stands out ...”

“... or no reform, as long as it’s new,’ Ned, O’Neill’s surrogate, says at the end. However, it took a bout of tuberculosis and a long reflective convalescence before his vision of his new life took the shape of playwright. ‘I want to be an artist or nothing,’ he wrote in 1914 to George Pierce Baker, applying to ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... outdid even Eugene O’Neill, who completed only two of his projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out ...”

“... did what all of us do when cornered – he bolted like a cony. He hitched two lifts and finally took a bus. Waiting for that bus, he had observed a wrecked fishing boat rotting in an estuary of cracking mud. This made him anxious and uneasy, innocent a sight as it was. The old wreck had been as good as melting in the scorching midday sun, just like Mr Stone ...”

“... its strange and extreme silentness’. Coleridge wrote this line in 1798, a couple of years before John Marsh finished the first part of his History of My Private Life, and a reading of ‘Frost at Midnight’, along with some of the other ‘Conversation Poems’ – ‘The Aeolian Harp’, ‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’, ‘The Nightingale’, for ...”

“... and POMO lapsed into obscurity, until a strange thing, a kind of historical rhyme, occurred. Elton John bought Watford Football Club and appointed the energetic Graham Taylor as manager. Taylor, looking for a way of fulfilling his boss’s ambition of making Watford into a First Division team, came across a statistical survey which showed that the majority of ...”

“... man reached out and, in a gesture strongly reminiscent of something Darth Vader does in Star Wars, took his windpipe between the gloved thumb and index finger of his right hand. The man went quiet and very still. ‘You getting my message?’ asked the policeman. ‘It’s time for you to piss off now.’ I gave up writing football match reports soon after ...”

“... of Attic culture through the Phoenicians from Egypt – activities which he rather touchingly took up again during his last years as a Classics professor in Dublin. All his life Hopkins was haunted by the sense of personal bankruptcy and impotence, the straining of ‘time’s eunuch’ with no more to ‘spend’, and this sense of ...”

“... who died in 1811, E.H. Coleridge established beyond doubt that the poems were written in memory of John Edleston, a 15-year-old Trinity choirboy with whom Byron fell in love in October 1805. And Marchand has subsequently fleshed out the episode. Edleston (nicknamed ‘the Cornelian’) was working-class, fair, thin (Byron was at the time monstrously fat), and ...”

“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... new terran planet, new animal and plant creation and new social orders to inhabit it. He evidently took care and specialist advice in putting the whole together. Plausibility has always been a fetish with him (he disdains, for instance, the conveniently easy tricks of Faster than Light travel in his SF, thinking it scientifically illogical). The Helliconian ...”

“... motion. In the old days, after several wet weeks there would be landslips in the cuttings that took the tramlines down to the promontory where the line comes into the open at a point on the fault scarp (it shows on the map as a ruled line along the west side of Wellington Harbour). You are still high up when you emerge from the cutting: it was (and is) a ...”

“... longer and later than usual that year, and on 17 December 1903, with Orville at the controls (they took turns), the Wright brothers’ plane flew for the first time. Man had achieved powered flight. The rest, as everyone knows, is history, all the way from Kitty Hawk to the £29.99 easyJet offer to Catania you’ve only this minute deleted from your inbox (or ...”