“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”