“... anti-talent for it (the Oscars, the primaries, the hearings, the trials, Shirley Temple, Clarence Thomas, Andrea Dworkin, Al Sharpton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Swaggart). Whereas, over here, maleness itself has become an embarrassment. Male consciousness, male pride, male rage – we don’t want to hear about it. This of course is the very diffidence and ...”

“... Thomas More, the scrupulous martyr, is the complete English saint. But no man can be a saint in God’s eyes, and no man should be one in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... one of the stories of his life. In a biography published in 1830, six years after Byron’s death, Thomas Moore reported a conversation between the schoolboy Byron and his tutor ‘Dummer’ Rogers. Witnessing the terrible treatment the boy was given for his club foot, Rogers remarked, ‘It makes me uncomfortable, my Lord, to see you sitting there in such ...”

“... case via a series of discoveries and reversals. His studies were a continuation of a childhood love of 16th-century miniatures that had led him, as a schoolboy, to make drawings in the style of Nicholas Hilliard. He was interested not only in the paintings but the dress, jewellery and rituals of the age. Such interests were not encouraged at university. At ...”

“... pompous, but I recognised Brooke’s talent at once, and remarked that the epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne – ‘Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and Some Falsehoods almost Truths’ – contains ‘in a sense justification of all novel-writing’. I knew nothing of Jocelyn Brooke himself, except what was to be gathered from this book. He was, in ...”

“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... over evolution in the 1830s led to his being ostracised from the scientific establishment (his love of opera, familiarity with foreign languages and the fact that he never married probably also positioned him as an outsider – as did his caustic tongue). His dissemination of Lamarckian ideas had an influence far wider than his zoological contributions to ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... even though the canon has been exploded outwards, and even though the number of people who really love reading him is now, I would guess, less than a thousandth of what it was in 1720.He achieved this status through roughly equal measures of will, luck and brilliance. He absorbed and imitated Jonson, Milton, Spenser, Waller, Cowley, and above all Dryden (who ...”

“... man out being Corporal John Ledyard, a marine, of Groton, Connecticut. (Another Boy’s Own boy: Thomas Jefferson encouraged him to walk from Siberia to Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, and on to Virginia. He was arrested at Irkutsk and returned to the Polish border; later he was hired to help explore the Niger; he died en route, in Cairo.) Ledyard was ...”