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“... The Children’s Book, Philip Warren is walking on Romney Marsh, towards his favourite church, St Thomas Becket. He ‘knew little about Thomas Becket’, Byatt writes, ‘and did not know that the church was built on Becket lands’. Philip made his way from tuft to tuft of the marsh grass, for it was sodden underfoot and ...”

“... difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his ...”

“... very good sources, too, notably the stunning lecture delivered in 1935 by the ex-naval officer Rupert Gould, who spent a dozen years after the First World War restoring all four of Harrison’s clocks to working order in the state they now enjoy in the splendid Time Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. So, for example, the third clock, which took ...”

“... genius, as the non-combatants Picasso or T.S. Eliot were to do. In a very different way Edward Thomas, who found his true voice in the war but independently of the fighting, would probably have kept it, and been a real presence in post-poetry: yet speculation has an element of post hoc propter hoc. More typical is the way in which each country is aware of ...”

“... is the most ‘European’ of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small part ...”

“... and the training ground for a generation of Labour leaders. These men are conspicuously absent: Thomas Cook, impresario of mass tourism, appears in this book, but A.J. Cook, the fire-breathing leader of the Miners’ Federation, does not; the charismatic Aneurin Bevan figures (albeit for his marriage to Jennie Lee rather than his politics), but Ernest ...”

“... Marlowe had obtained more substantial patronage than he received from the Countess of Pembroke and Thomas Walsingham, these stories might not have been told very differently. The exciting instability about Marlovian drama, our uncertainty as to whether Dr Faustus is a morality play or a parody of one, whether The Massacre at Paris is a tragedy or a black ...”

“... sick of the war and of Bunny, she went with her daughter to stay in Wales with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. After a brief period of peaceful country life, during which Dylan took her ‘very much under his wing’, a neighbour with more conventional views of sexual propriety, annoyed by Thomas’s flirtatious behaviour ...”

“... undefined and undefinable beneath them’. This is apparent in the poems he wrote while living on Thomas, Lord Fairfax’s estate in Yorkshire, where he was appointed tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary some time after Fairfax resigned as Commander-in-Chief – or Lord General – of the Parliamentary forces. Fairfax resigned because he did not want to take ...”

“... up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with the ...”

“... for his oratory. He was famous for his love affairs, possibly because he wrote poems not unlike Rupert Brooke’s, and a good many were love poems. Very handsome he was, like a lion … How could wives not fall in love with him? Not to mention daughters.’ In 1963, I was working as a researcher on the BBC TV series The Great War, for the 50th anniversary ...”

“... Great writers usually do, nonetheless. ‘Fame wants to find safety,’ as Canetti has put it. Thomas Mann was notorious for his self-importance and his suspicion of anyone whom he felt might be detecting signs of weakness in him; Thomas Hardy spent his last days writing venomously bad verses against fellow authors whom ...”

“... enjoyed hay rides in the back of her ‘Uncle’ John’s hay cart; that she has a brother called Thomas and another called William and a twin sister called Elizabeth; that her mother recently died of cancer; that her father is called Hastings and is a retired colonel. That is about it. This might serve as a modest sketch of someone’s life, but is wholly ...”

“... and idiosyncratic ‘Lorenzo’ who wrote Women in Love and was in many ways a real-life double of Rupert Birkin, the novel’s sometimes priggishly prophetic ‘salvator mundi’. And if, as Lorenzo/Birkin, a ‘priest of love’, the erstwhile schoolmaster preached a doctrine drawn from bohemian Schwabing as mediated by the free-thinking, free-love-loving ...”

“... Nijinsky choreographed the ballet with a volume of Gauguin reproductions open on the studio floor. Rupert Brooke fell in love with the Ballets Russes. ‘Do you realise you have just seen a miracle?’ he said to a friend. ‘Nijinsky actually stopped still in the air.’ The Russians, he added, ‘can redeem our civilisation’. Ottoline Morrell was more ...”