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“... other at length? As for the army of sniffing commentators: can no one remember how it is for the young woman confronting the older man, so seductively marked by experience, so essentially powerful, always knowing you better than you know yourself? The entire affair would, I imagine, have reminded them of their relations with Olga Kosakiewicz, who began as ...”

“... flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still young in English and his pleasure in it – in bending and stretching it – is unselfconscious but palpable. As MacInnes points out, he invokes any comparison, uses any term or turn of phrase, that will convey the impression he is after, but though he is bold he ...”

“... the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour ...”

“... in the warrior bands of the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded Rome. The military service of young aristocrats in a lord’s household coincides with the beginnings of vassalage as described by Bloch, originating in an atmosphere heavy with the odour of household bread. The world of chivalry was a world where men were linked to each other by strong ...”

“... As​ a young researcher applying for a US visa to go to a conference in the mid-1960s, I presented myself at the fortress-like embassy in Grosvenor Square and ticked the boxes affirming that I was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party and did not intend to attempt to overthrow the US government by force ...”

“... eyeing me through a bookshop window. Benjamin Haydon’s touching and slightly impertinent young likeness (the original is in the National Portrait Gallery) graced a book called Fiery Heart. No surprise there. Many people call their books things like that. But then I saw the subtitle: ‘The First Life of Leigh Hunt’. That stopped me in my ...”

“... Tale of the Heike, newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily ...”

“... economical with the truth. A rival anthrax vaccine had been produced by Jean-Joseph Toussaint, a young professor at Toulouse Veterinary School, who treated the bacteria with antiseptic to kill them. His approach, in other words, was fundamentally different from Pasteur’s, which was to enfeeble, but not kill, the organisms by growing them at high ...”

“... the British government forced universities to introduce doctorates in order to dissuade ambitious young British researchers from going to Germany to gain their PhDs. Of equal importance was the global influence of German culture, above all music. German conservatories offered a rigorous training that couldn’t be found elsewhere, backed by the hegemony of ...”

“... first mentor in what he called the ‘fantastic American science of showbusiness’ was his uncle Arthur, an antiques dealer friendly with Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker. Arthur introduced him to the circus, then to nightclubs and music halls. As de Baecque points out, Melville’s gangster films invariably include a ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”

“... of Lady Cunard (whom he detested), he was now able to launch himself, a successful and unattached young literary lion, into loftier social circles. Mr Amory has edited the letters meticulously. To a letter of July 1931 he appends 31 footnotes identifying those mentioned. They include one future duke, one earl, one younger son of a marquess, one daughter of a ...”

“... forecasters; inductivists; mystical theologians like Teilhard de Chardin; mystical humanists like Arthur Koestler, who, although ‘a very clever and knowledgable man’, ‘has no real grasp of how scientists go about their work’; there are advocates of such doctrines as historicism, scientism and poetism; there is (after a balanced judgment) Herbert ...”

“... influenced by the Presbyterian Enlightenment of 18th-century Scotland and its Ulster outposts. The young politician was happily amphibious in a habitat which encompassed both the terra firma of the Established Church and the lukewarm waters of Enlightened Presbyterianism. In the political turmoil of the late century the Whig tradition of the Enlightenment ...”

“... her betrayal. In 1841, when Baudelaire was twenty, Aupick, deciding he’d had enough of the young poet’s wilfulness and insolence, arranged for him to take a sea voyage to Calcutta. Charles’s ‘aberrations had caused cruel anguish to his poor mother’, Aupick explained in a letter to a friend justifying the exile. But like Hamlet, Baudelaire ...”