“... Robert Darnton’s reputation was founded on his monumental The Business of Enlightenment (1979). In this study of ‘the life-cycle of a single book’ Darnton tracked the creation, manufacture, distribution and reception of the fourth edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. His account drew on the archive of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, on the Franco-Swiss border ...”

“... capacity, invite a comparison with a British statesman of an earlier generation, Sir Robert Peel; and they made, as Peel’s career had shown, a dangerous combination. Samuel’s Balliol in the final Jowett years had the same pre-eminence as Peel’s Christ Church. Both took first-class honours (though Samuel’s history First after four years ...”

“... of a far more illustrious progeny), going on to J.R. Cozens (who went mad) and Girtin (who died young), and eventually reaching a triumphant climax with the work of J.M.W. Turner. The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, on view at the Royal Academy until 12 April, sets out to recycle this rather tired old story in a manner that remains remarkably ...”

“... mise-en-page. The central character, the focalising consciousness of the novel, is the eponymous young man, but the overwhelming sense is of a slipperiness, a difficulty in finding your bearings or keeping your footing in the story. It circles repetitively around its receding purpose, as much Hamlet as Oedipus, but it’s even less hopeful than either and ...”

“... an inventive, a hugely fructifying writer widely read sixty or eighty years ago when Thurber was young, although out of fashion for at least the last half-century. Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ begins, with a fine surprising immediacy:That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now ...– the ...”

“... Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the ...”

“... and Romania, smuggling was an honoured and necessary trade. This is where Ludvik Hoch, or Robert Maxwell as he was later to rename himself, was born and brought up. Tax differences on the slaughter of animals and the sale of meat provided an opportunity for a lucrative and illegal trade in smuggled cattle. Beneath the full moon, both horses and ...”

“... a troll ... a packet of iced gems, a balloon, a plum, a pear, a banana’. Think of the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trying to steal apples; standing rapt before a fruit stall, gazing at ripe pears. Today it’s Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia ...”

“... I must have been quite young the first time I saw Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art, barely into my teens. I knew little about Cubism, less about Iberian sculpture, and nothing at all about the title’s supposed reference to a brothel in Barcelona; I am not sure I even knew what a brothel was ...”

“... on Marshland (1975), her second collection, the poet sees azaleas and thinks, ‘I am no longer young. What/of it?’ and wishes for ‘the long/decaying days of autumn when I shall begin/the great poems of my middle period’. In her many poems about female adolescence and sexuality, often using mythical figures (she writes throughout her career from the ...”

“... now is simply an observation of the kind of times we live in and how attitudes develop among our young people. Over the last weekend I saw a movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was ...”

“... is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s lower depths, where they often walked all night, deploring the hypocrisy of high ...”

“... with the explosion of ‘revolutionary culture’ which amazed and moved Europe and the rebellious young of the Americas. He was the editor of the independent daily paper Revolucion, while Cabrera Infante, already famous as a journalist and novelist, ran the paper’s Monday cultural supplement, Lunes. They were together in their beginnings, for Cabrera ...”

“... of champagne, even on the high Amazon. The jacket of Travels with a Superior Person shows the young Curzon, resembling a more soigné young Churchill, standing proprietorially before the Pyramids. This is the man who postponed marriage to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a ...”

“... Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future fortunes of us both’. The tourists had planned to stop in Oxford for three or four days but ended up staying three weeks. When they finally set out for Wales, Coleridge’s head ...”