“... his own ideas.’ The exact quotation, incidentally, comes from a letter Byron wrote to John Murray on 9 October 1820: Mr Keats whose poetry you enquire after – appears to me what I have already said; such writing is a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f – gg – g his Imagination. I don’t mean that he is indecent, but viciously ...”

“... Venice with his memories. Some will read his diary with amused contempt; and it almost looks as if John Sparrow intended them to do so. He mocks Leeves in his epilogue with some rollicking verses to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’. Leeves was what Guardsmen used to call an old twank. The diary begins with him twittering in Venice. ‘Cannonade every evening ...”

“... of attractive works of art. The count would rise to eight if his taste ran to the work of Gwen John, or even to a dozen if he were indulgent. The remainder of the illustrations, some 94 per cent of the total, could serve equally well as the illustrations to a book called Dreary Painting Through The Ages. Ms Greer tries to upgrade some of these ...”

“... Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... it at any rate materially superior. Yan Fu took on board almost everything he found there: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, the notion of impartial justice, patriotism. Until then, however, prejudice and hostile stereotypes persisted. ‘The English,’ announced placards posted up in Canton just after the First ...”

“... birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the moralistic Beaverbrook) had a picture of the baby under the headline: ‘Who Is My Daddy?’ It was a feast, all the more so because ...”

“... for John Minihan Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas ...”

“... you feel you need a reminder of the timeframe. Now we move back to 1970, when Milk picks up Scott Smith (James Franco – last seen, by me at least, in the Spider-Man movies) in the New York subway, finds himself in a lasting relationship, comes out of the closet and moves to California, shedding his suit for denims and growing a beard and ponytail. He looks ...”

“... which has failed the Lawrences – it is life itself. This is the private story. Wing Commander John Lawrence, after his 28 years in the RAF, took early retirement and became an assistant secretary to the MCC, another bastion of tradition. With his turned-up moustache and his near-worship of the Royal Family, he comes over as the archetypal Flying Officer ...”

“... who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs Stevenson’s faded existence is not lost on him, and he does what he can for her ...”

“... about Bacon’s claim that his parents had ‘sold’ him to an older man, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin. But he did visit Berlin with Harcourt-Smith in the spring of 1927. He was excited by the city itself but not by German art: ‘It always had too much of a story to tell,’ he said. In Paris and ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style took on added significance when ...”

“... against the shadow-plots derived from earlier fiction: as practised readers, we recognise Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway as the centres of intensity in the book’s life, the ‘major characters’, and are led to expect connection between them at the level of event. Instead, their contacts are oblique and communal: like other inhabitants of the ...”

“... begins with a comparison of the careers of William Godwin, the philosopher and novelist, and John Thelwall, the leading orator of the popular reform movement and author of The Peripatetic, one of the very best, most unread and most unclassifiable works of the 18th century: part novel, part travel journal, part satire, part commentary on the state of the ...”