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“... problems. Thus it was natural for him to jot down à propos of Chapter Five: ‘Bring in the other young couple. Yes ... Mixture of Oriental blood – or imperceptibly acquired nature – in them. Yes.’ But what the eventual destiny of Helena and Neville Landless was to be is for ever withheld. Unless he kept a secret second set of strategic plans we know ...”

“... where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon ...”

“... class of 30 12-year-old boys. Another English lesson: not Great Expectations this time, but Young Warriors by V.S. Reid. It is the first time the boys have seen the book, and there is a murmur of interest as the texts are handed out. ‘Who’s this geezer on the back?’ somebody asks. I explain that it’s a photo of the author. The ...”

“... usual suspects) peasants attending a market fair unleashed their rage on a hapless young nobleman named Alain de Monéys, a short, balding bachelor with ‘a local reputation for politeness and generosity’ who had made the mistake of arriving at the fairground in the wake of his despised cousin, Camille de Maillard. Accused by the crowd of ...”

“... that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to go to Los Angeles (and San Francisco), into the heart of noir mythology, to make a movie that alarmed Hollywood. Boorman was 33, and probably as ...”

“... a budget of £106 million in 2019; its car was the slowest on the grid by far. Most drivers start young, racing in go-karts from the age of five or six and moving up through Formulas 4, 3 and 2 before, if they’re lucky, getting a seat in an F1 car. It can cost £50,000 a year to compete on the karting circuit and £500,000 to race a season in Formula ...”

“... is some poetic licence: John Low is the centre of attention, even when he’s off-stage. As a young man, Low just missed being caught up in the mutinies at Vellore and Ellore, and in 1811 he saw 15 minutes of battle at Cornelis as part of Lord Minto’s expedition to take Java from the Dutch. Mount gives each of the three episodes a chapter, despite ...”

“... works as part of that biographical evidence: Constance’s grief over the death of her son Arthur in King John must reflect Shakespeare’s grief at the death of his own son, Hamnet; a reference to cuckoldry in Sonnet 93 indicates that Anne Hathaway was unfaithful; and so on. As Shapiro comments, perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own life at ...”

“... I imagine, to furnish a famous author with a subject. When I arrived at the leprosarium as a young doctor, I had a fierce battle with some of the missionary sisters regarding the care of the patients, a quarrel between ancients and moderns. It was the perfect scenario for a Greene novel. I did not say a word about it. Twenty-five years later, when we ...”

“... to know more than they let on, never quite telling their whole story. Gangly, schoolboyish, clever Arthur McCash hands Nathaniel a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories as if it were a clue; Olive Lawrence, an element in The Darter’s colourful love life, is an ethnographer and geographer who speaks to the children ‘of Asia and the ends of the earth’. The ...”

“... Home Rule was a step too far. Isabella Tod, who was born in Edinburgh but moved to Ulster as a young woman, was a pillar of progressive Gladstonian liberalism, the founder of the first Irish Women’s Suffrage Society and a champion of educational opportunities for girls, but when the Liberal Party split over Home Rule in 1886 she co-founded the Belfast ...”

“... with the boilerplate blandness of the three titles, which might have escaped from the pen of Sir Arthur Bryant and fail to convey the impish iconoclasm and acid acuity that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively ...”

“... Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory where young Alfred grew up: the alcoholism, madness and opium addiction. Under this family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment ...”

“... question. ‘He’ is Wolcott Balestier – brother of Kipling’s future wife Carrie – who died young of typhoid and is Seymour-Smith’s candidate as Kipling’s ‘lover’. Suppose that, knowing he was dying and having nothing more to lose, he told Carrie ... of the nature of Kipling’s friendship for him? Of the nature of their relationship? Of how ...”

“... he began composing, and also sketching opera plots; his family thought they had done well for the young man in obtaining a post for him as conductor at the Magdeburg Theatre. It turned out to be a disaster: Wagner was not paid properly; and after a performance of his opera was cancelled because the cast had beaten itself bloody in a brawl before the curtain ...”