“... Berkhamsted, and his father, its headmaster, was sufficiently astonished by this action to put the young Graham into the hands of a psychotherapist, who required him to make regular notes of his dreams so they could be discussed during daily sessions. While this took place Greene was removed from the hated school. Psychotherapy proved to be a wonderful ...”

“... that they should remember their birthdays. In Scott of the Antarctic Elspeth Huxley noted that Dr Edward Wilson’s 39th occurred during a side-trip to study the emperor penguins: ‘quite the funniest birthday I have ever spent’. In the novel, when Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans mentions his birthday in an attempt at emotional blackmail, Scott dismisses ...”

“... from the actual writing of history. Dr de Ste Croix spares nobody – not Eric Hobsbawm or Edward Thompson. But what he writes about theory is worth paying attention to, since, like Hobsbawm and Thompson, he has produced first-class history himself. His book should also stimulate ancient historians, who one hopes will be no more set in their ways than ...”

“... both attracted to and suspicious of her, Robert is an ‘indolent, handsome and indifferent’ young barrister who spends his time lounging around reading French novels. When George Talboys returns from Australia with a fortune, determined to lay it at the feet of the wife he deserted three years before, and then mysteriously disappears, Robert is shaken ...”

“... Every word is recorded. Grant skilfully shows how modes of speech capture attitudes. He quotes Sir Edward Marshall Hall QC, ‘doyen of criminal advocates, in the defence of Madame Fahmy, on trial in 1923 for the murder of her Egyptian husband in the Savoy hotel’: She discovered for the first time that he had not only the vilest of vile tempers, but was ...”

“... the settled bourgeoisie; Charlie Chaplin placed his almost diagonally across the top of his head; Edward, Prince of Wales angled his upward, seeming to signify the slippery slope between masculine grace and sexual predation; the sluggers of Bandits’ Roost in New York City tilted their crowns downward almost to eye-level. The fedora, which, at least in the ...”

“... of champagne, even on the high Amazon. The jacket of Travels with a Superior Person shows the young Curzon, resembling a more soigné young Churchill, standing proprietorially before the Pyramids. This is the man who postponed marriage to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a ...”

“... café I cared for. There were undergraduates I knew at whom Auden made passes, though I was still young and innocent enough to find a pass as remarkable as the person making it.When he died in 1973 his death seemed to me less a loss to poetry – the poetry was largely over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store ...”

“... It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.Boswell was plagued by venereal disease and thought his bouts were worse because ‘I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison ...”

“... but sure, to the Widow Bull’s victualling house in Deptford, where in spring 1593 four young men spent a day drinking wine in the garden. Mrs Bull’s house was not a tavern, nor was she a sort of Mistress Quickly, half-expecting a fight to break out as the sun declined. She was a bailiff’s widow, with some court connections; her house was a ...”

“... the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come from the rapture of the American young at the unfamiliar emotional and political power of coexisting in public together, body and soul. I have reconnected via Facebook to old friends who might otherwise never have resurfaced, and followed grassroots politics and movements. And I’ve wasted ...”

“... fell in love with their leading actresses, wrote their major works in six years and died young. More important, they both wrote plays about the impact on the present of the future; Ibsen’s great subject was the impact on the present of the past. In Chekhov’s first great play, The Seagull, the first three acts adumbrate hopes and ambitions that ...”

“... local girls with whom Bert – as he then was – became involved during his adolescence and young manhood were so homogeneous in their attitudes and fortunes that they provide a valuable chapter of social history. Jessie Chambers, Alice Dix, Louie Burrows, Agnes Holt, Helen Corke, and others who are less closely relevant, can, with regard to their ...”

“... which descends upon a decadent town. The narrator is one of a group of sporting, drinking young hedonists who call to mind, variously, yuppies and lager louts, Essex Men and the Bright Young Things of Waugh and Huxley and Eliot and Scott Fitzgerald. The narrator describes the night of the flood, his glimpse of the ...”

“... In a lawsuit brought in 1610 against the nuisance caused by a neighbour’s pigs, the great lawyer Edward Coke, employed in the defence, declared that ‘the building of the house for hogs was necessary for the sustenance of man and one ought not to have so delicate a nose that he cannot bear the smell of hogs.’ Later in the century, a religious writer ...”