“... did they make of him? Peering at the mature student Dunn hard at work at his window, the local young women in rollers find ‘a specimen under glass, being protected,/And laugh at me watching them’. Except for a single moment of first-person plural solidarity, in ‘Ins and Outs’, the inhabitants of Terry Street are always ‘they’, not ‘we’, the ...”

“... in its witnessing of the enormous volume of physical and verbal abuse women still receive. A young woman described a stranger making a sleazy and crude sexual comment to her in the street. ‘I was 18,’ she added as a final insult, ‘and he was in his thirties.’ There is no way to reconcile her very contemporary assumptions with the assumptions I ...”

“... is set in Florence, in the year 1855, and the narration takes the form of letters written by a young American, Robert Booth, to his friend Professor Prescott, an authority on Theoretical and Practical Ethics. Booth, in retreat from rejection in love and a sense of his own failure in literature, has known at least one ...”

“... Oxford from 1981 to 1989, his career has been all of a piece. The scholar, the actor, the dashing young subaltern and the Union debater, have all gone into the making of this extremely elegant and rather grand figure. In teaching, research and administration his career is a testament to the rise of a new professionalism in the Universities since 1945. But ...”

“... noon to dinner, where the remains of yesterday’s venison and a couple of brave green [i.e. young] geese’. Wall wants to see recipes not only as the beguiling curiosities they evidently are, but also as sites for something like a domestic version of experimental science. One of the defining narratives of the 17th century is the rise of a new kind of ...”

“... is here conveniently known, is essentially familiar. Whether it is seen as the tale of the fatuous young charmer and the intriguing, ambitious witch, or, as they themselves chose to present it, as the pathetic picture of two orphans of the storm, victimised by the hound Baldwin, the main facts on which it is based are widely known and the subject of little ...”

“... dignitaries. One of these – in perhaps the most bizarre of the encounters on record – was the young Jesse Owens, passing through England on his return from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Against all the odds, the meeting seems to have been at least a partial success. Owens claimed to have been ‘thrilled’ at talking to the famous scholar who knew more about ...”

“... at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say ...”

“... was in the Marshalsea. It wasn’t the childhood he wanted, so he hadn’t spoken about it. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in his clever new study, the mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor ...”

“... one and the same. (Obviously we have to make an exception for industrial novelists like the late Robert Ludlum, who have a team who write the books as well as others who type them before they add their authorial name, so that there are three layers to the finished manuscript – or possibly four if you include the ‘ideas’ officer.) There was a brief ...”

“... The Young Rebecca is a collection of the writings of Rebecca West from 1911 to 1917, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus, with just the right amount of explanation and comment. In one respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title ...”

“... tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject profoundly. Her discoveries about the personal life ...”

“... of exotic ‘prayer’ shawl draped over his expressive shoulders, smoking away, talking to eager young girls. Mike Nichols, the serpent in the garden … Claggart to the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of his latest ...”

“... gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend ...”

“... when I was talking to her. The others were sent out to Kinko’s, and I was briefly alone. Then a young Asian man dressed in an immaculate grey suit and grey tie joined me. He was wearing a name tag that said ‘Kristina’. I asked him how he happened to be here. ‘I had a friend who worked there,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s no big deal ...”