“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

“... that I had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did ...”

“... persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being,’ the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said. Scientists use pictures more than most academics, but ‘somewhere along the way’, he cautioned, they have lost the sense that it’s wrong to identify pictures with the realities they represent. We say that we ‘see’ a four-week ...”

“... universities, infiltrated the ranks of the professoriat and proceeded to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in ...”

“... in ordinary, day-to-day life. In Lark and Termite (2009), her most recent novel but one, the young protagonist bakes for her disabled younger brother: Nonie hates the idea of blue cake, she says it looks like something old and spoiled, too old to eat, though it’s light and delicate and flavoured with anise. But Termite likes it, and he likes pink cake ...”

“... school, which he ran single-handed (remembering Alabama, he was pleased to find that one of his young gentlemen was black), while consolidating his records of the natural history of the New World, and beginning extensive new studies of British invertebrates. Self-education accompanied the education of others, as it would throughout his life. His spiritual ...”

“... walked out on stage and said: ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The colour field painter Stephen Mueller lived in the building, as did the poet Eleanor Lerman, who worked in the harpsichord factory and wrote poems on a blackboard there; Harrison saw them and encouraged her to publish. The resulting book, Armed Love, was nominated for the National ...”

“... a heavy shadow that dogs her like an obligation. In her novel Les Samouraïs (1990), her young alter ego is called ‘a bull-dozer’. We don’t have to go as far as that, even if it is said to be ‘the best of compliments’. Kristeva arrives at elegance, even brio, but only after cautious preparations, as if a plane were to need the length of ...”

“... through it will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice ... Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 13, Stephen Mitchell’s translation Rilke was born into an ambitious but failing family in German-speaking Prague in 1875. His first given name was René, which he changed to Rainer when he met the extravagant Lou Andreas-Salomé. Before that he had unhappily ...”

“... of class and power. ‘This language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine,’ Stephen Dedalus thinks while talking to an English priest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The language isn’t the priest’s and isn’t Stephen’s, but the priest talks as if he ...”

“... at Harvard, they are ‘Puritans’ (though in his preface he blames this on his copy-editor); Stephen Tomkins, who is British, prefers lower case. In America, the name carries more baggage than in England and Scotland, and might mean any English colonist in New England, where industry and piety marched in lockstep. But the use of a ‘P’ still suggests ...”

“... and reassuringly familiar to its audience, each episode, according to its recent presenter Kirsty Young, ‘a well-tethered hammock’ cradling itself ‘around each highly individual guest’.For decades the famous and worthy, or would-be worthy, have queued up to appear on it. On his death in 1965, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s heir presumptive for ...”

“... at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the sole NHS service for gender-diverse young people, based at the Tavistock Clinic in London. It’s a job history I no longer disclose when I meet people. The work of the GIDS team has been the subject of unceasing media – and social media – attack in recent years. We weren’t hammered just in ...”

“... a prurient interest in Jeffrey Archer’s spotty back and T.S. Eliot’s rupture truss (to which Stephen Spender enigmatically refers) mingles with a pious desire to be as well-informed as possible. On the whole, I’m not entirely sorry to be led from temptation by Jones’s obedient vandalism or Valerie Eliot’s stonewall around her husband’s life. At ...”

“... in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s misfortune leads him to wish he had children, to reassess his relationship with his parents, and to ...”