“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... sister of his own intended, the much more docile Edith. A startled Sara was introduced to her new young man as he returned, bedraggled and sunburned, from the tour of Wales – ‘a dreadful figure’, as she remembered, though admittedly ‘eloquent and clever’. And so Coleridge abandoned Cambridge and Southey Oxford, and they moved to Bristol, Southey’s ...”

“... autism to be rare, homogeneous and totally debilitating: a form of psychosis that afflicted young children, sealing them off permanently from normal, loving relations with others and the world. Autism was seen as outside the realm of regular human functioning. When Oliver Sacks read Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he ...”

“... explication of the occult element in classic and classical texts. His American disciples, of whom Francis Fukuyama is probably the most celebrated, achieved a brief nearness to real power during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, one of them (William Kristol, son of Irving) being the Aristotelian mentor of Dan Quayle. The giveaway in Straussian critiques is ...”

“... When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in spiritualism while her philandering husband went out to fix people’s Hotpoint twin-tubs, and she quite often spoke of people who had ‘crossed to the other side ...”

“... ways to compose a sentence’? – seek and ye shall find … You must – do you hear me, my young friend? – you must work harder than you do. I suspect you of being a bit of a loafer. Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim. You were born to be a poet: be one. Everything ...”

“... In​ 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety ...”

“... a job with the British-run Egyptian postal service, and Nelly Grün, a cultured and attractive young woman from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews. Nelly was visiting her uncle as a reward for graduating from high school, ‘still a fairly unusual achievement for girls in central Europe’, her son would write more than seventy years later, using his ...”

“... right. The House of Lords, in a decision which would have brought tears of joy to the eyes of Francis Cornford, whose satire on university politics, Microcosmographia Academica, had almost a century earlier advanced the axiom that one should never do anything for the first time, declined to allow such a claim to enter the common law. Adopting the common ...”

“... and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in purging the Head, against ...”

“... rare tropical plants as ‘discreet emissaries’ of her passion. The guys ranged from brainless young studs such as Auguste Hériot, playboy heir to the Magasins du Louvre department store fortune (‘a mustachioed Child with an innocent gaze and an erection’ in Thurman’s memorable phrase) to the morphine-addicted Georges Kessel, known as ...”

“... sense of pleasure.’She was not encouraged to think of herself as a literary celebrity. As a young woman, she wrote her novels on the sitting-room table at which her mother sewed: her family were proud of her early success, but would, she said, have felt ‘almost humiliated’ had they thought her composition required any ‘artificial aids’, such as ...”

“... seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank was quite a close friend of Forster’s, and undoubtedly called him ‘Morgan’; his book of course benefits greatly from his personal knowledge, but he was quite right to regard the familiarity implied by regular use of the first name as out ...”

“... had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them what every reader wants to know: what happens after the book’s last page, or play’s last scene? It’s unusual to have so close a glimpse of the offstage author spinning consequences (and since Austen was only entertaining her ...”

“... lords and parliament. Hazlitt mildly criticised this tendency in Cobbett’s left-wing ally, Sir Francis Burdett, who was always ‘wanting to go back to the early times of our Constitution and history in search of the principles of law & liberty. Liberty, in our opinion, is but a modern invention (the growth of books and printing) – and whether new or ...”