“... 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 ...”

“... and mercurial and overweight and bore more than a passing resemblance, it was often remarked, to a young Hitchcock, who made several comic appearances in the novels in the guise of the boys’ reluctant sponsor. Jupiter had entered a competition and won all three of them the use of a gold-plated Rolls-Royce complete with an English chauffeur by the name of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Blake’s Newton as hero in the courtyard of the British Library). In the 1930s, a group of young biologists in Cambridge associated with the embryologist Joseph Needham formed the Theoretical Biology Club (TBC), calling themselves ‘organicists’ in an attempt to transcend the tired opposition between mechanism and vitalism. At the International ...”

“... be tactfully retrieved from service as paperweights and doorstops, chiefly thanks to the work of a young volunteer, Mary Porter, author of What Rome Was Built With (1907). Porter, whose formal education had been truncated by paternal edict, eventually studied crystallography in Germany. She returned to Oxford with a fellowship in the 1930s and helped revise ...”

“... of this is Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Man I Killed’, a preternaturally lucid description of a young Vietnamese soldier blown up by the narrator’s grenade. O’Brien’s precise, almost entranced detailing of the star-shaped hole where one of the man’s eyes used to be, his torn ear lobe, his scattered sandals, a butterfly alighting on his chin, are ...”

“... war I felt little sympathy for what I considered an intrusion of the West.’ He gave advice to a young Australian who wrote saying that he could not get down to work: ‘Directly after breakfast you sit down at the table with a blank sheet of paper and a pen and a glass of whiskey. You drink the glass of whiskey and you begin to write anything that comes ...”

“... was an act of love to be presented. Her writing has none of that endearing and secret vanity which Francis Kilvert’s diary was to have, and in which the reader can now share. The ‘quarrel with himself’ was for Wordsworth the simultaneous assertion of his private vision and of his human heart and principles. When he writes of ‘the soothing thoughts that ...”

“... well in the 1960s, Carter saw her status go, as she put it, ‘from being a very promising young writer to being completely ignored in two novels’. At this distance those novels, the dystopian fantasies Heroes and Villains and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as well as The Passion of New Eve which followed, may seem like ...”