“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... could see exhibitions of the work of Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso or Matisse and the work of their young British followers was not the Tate Gallery, which was hostile to Post-Impressionist work, certainly not the Royal Academy, and not the Hayward Gallery, which did not exist: it was the three small rooms of the Leicester Galleries which are described by ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... a political genius is laughable. But that is not to say he didn’t put his finger on something. Young people are sick of being short-changed compared with past generations. Mrs May must fix it. Or next time Britain will buy the Marxists’ fool’s gold – and the Tories will be helpless to prevent the inevitable horrors that will follow.’The Sun ...”

“... strongly reminiscent of that child’s life of Raphael which made such an impression on the young Sartre. Here, for example, is Penrose’s description of Picasso and his father arriving in Barcelona in 1895: ‘The distinguished, middle-aged man, slightly stooping, had a look of disillusionment, a sad resignation, whereas the small heir to his fading ...”

“... in this circumstance.’ This perspective has not prevailed; indeed, as recently as 2013, Pope Francis declared Mary Magdalene the Apostolorum Apostola, the apostle of apostles, emphasising her miraculous repentance: ‘Sometimes in our lives, tears are the lenses we need to see Jesus.’The cult of Mary Magdalene began to grow at the end of the sixth ...”

“... into which to put some of those strange phenomena of the Soviet Union’s last years. (He is too young to have seen these events for himself; this book is based on his PhD at Berkeley.) His is one of a number of new stories of perestroika which are now emerging. Most have a grassroots, out-of-Moscow perspective, but Kellner’s has Moscow in it too. His ...”

“... I’ve had it packed for a week now’) as well as her unhappiness. Welles’s own mother died young (or youngish – she was 42), but she wasn’t a victim. Daughter of a prosperous Illinois coal merchant, Beatrice Welles was handsome, dynamic and indefatigably improving, reading her son Shakespeare ‘before he could speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, every one a bestseller to be avoided with horror and loathing by any young person with the slightest vestige of humour or subversion. It is not just that the Fearsome Foursome live in a world of nannies and apple-cheeked farmers’ wives filling their milk-cans and calling them Miss Susan and Miss Titty (not an appellation which ...”

“... and, with equal enthusiasm, pursuing the hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon. He ended his life in an asylum. Cantor’s new theory had a mixed reception. His one-time teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the ...”

“... from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New York salonnier of the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten, who shamelessly made sure his name was associated with those he helped. Thayer had some literary ...”

“... see it,’ he wrote, ‘would think our Western Monks had hence borrowed their Ceremonies.’ Francis Xavier – whose source was an accommodating, illiterate, renegade Japanese wanted for murder, whom he met in Malacca in 1547 – initially believed that the Buddha was not an idol but, like Moses, had ordered the smashing of idols in the name of the One ...”