“... cannot explain.’ Empathy is often inexplicable. The next journey is to Bredfield, birthplace of Edward Fitzgerald, and thus of Omar Khayyám as we know him in English. Of FitzGerald’s versions of the Rubáiyát, Sebald observes finely that they ‘feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an ...”

“... in the Nineties, it hasn’t been one for (at the estimate of an erudite present-day resident, Sir Edward Playfair) the last six or seven decades. More than human influence is at work, however, in her disquisition on Beardsley’s correspondence with André Raffalovich, in which he addressed Raffalovich as ‘Mentor’ and signed himself ‘Télémaque’. The ...”

“... he has been 60 for the last 25 years. On his own admission there was never a boy Larkin; no young lad Philip, let alone Phil, ever. Besides, why a book? He must be fed up at the sight of books. It’s books, books, books every day of his life, and now here’s another of the blighters. Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel? Because ...”

“... 90 ponies to transport the family there, in 1929, over the 14,000-foot Burzil Pass; en route, the young nanny (who left the author her diaries and albums) suffered ‘Bursilitis’, a severe blistering caused by sun on frosted flesh, and her facial appearance made her look, in her own words, like ‘an Egyptian mummy in specs’. Gilgit was the sort of place ...”

“... girls and men, they had learnt at school. Delany shows how the Bedales ethos derived from Edward Carpenter and the ‘Simple Life’ community he set up at Millthorpe in 1883, four years before Brooke was born. Carpenter lectured on ‘Neo-Pagan’ ideals and on nailed shoes as ‘leather coffins’. Neo-Pagan activities were very photogenic, as can ...”

“... a sex worker, because ‘what is the difference between one kind of humiliation and another?’ A young gay man struggles to reconcile with his father, who considered his sexuality ‘a curse from heaven, a pathology’. Towards the end of the book we see the would-be recipients, waiting for messages that will never arrive, and then a postman at a post ...”

“... easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having already produced similar collections of the writings of ...”

“... insisted on keeping it in the purse with her pin number.She believed, with justification, that young people use material things to fool themselves into thinking they’re living their best life. (‘You can’t take it with you!’ was one of her favourite phrases.) If you’re eighteen now, obsolescence just tells you how much you’ve grown. Nobody with ...”

“... the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own ...”

“... Africa weren’t all that different from those of their counterparts in Europe, even a figure like Edward Chambré Hardman, whose father enjoyed photography and whose real passion – for landscape and cityscape – lay beyond the portraits he took in Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s. (Hardman was still taking portraits for a living after his photograph of the ...”

“... I read Gene Phillips’s Some Like It Wilder (2010) that the actor with the gun is the son of Edward G. Robinson, famous among many other reasons for playing the title role in Little Caesar, although I did, like most people, pick up the reference when Raft asks young Robinson where he got the ‘cheap trick’ of ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early ...”

“... Lincolnshire clergyman, a 19-year-old Harrovian and a Chamonix guide. They were the casualties of Edward Whymper’s successful assault on the Matterhorn in 1865, lost during the descent; a tragedy supposedly honoured by nature with an enormous fog-bow, incorporating two crosses. Whymper survived with two Swiss guides, father and son. The English chaplain of ...”

“... the midst of all those reformed prostitutes, thoughtful nuns, sailors home from the main, moribund young poets, drowning ladies, eminent critics splashed by turbulent mountain streams, and fugitive Christian missionaries panting from the chase, here was a painting taking as its subject textures, patterns and things, rather than personal histories and ...”