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“... her again the year before he introduced Carlyle, and though Irving was by then engaged to another former pupil, he and Jane fell in love. Of this Carlyle knew nothing until a friend forced Jane to come clean in 1825. Smitten at first sight, Carlyle began his pursuit. He veered awkwardly between shyness and arrogance, taking it upon himself to tell this ...”

“... murals portraying an idealised Britain, a red phone box, Big Ben, the Gherkin.A 15-year-old pupil there, Dima, was killed at a bus stop by a shell exploding. A former pupil was killed fighting on the front in Donetsk; another, while working as a journalist. Kaseko had seemed calm, cheerful and confident when I ...”

“... owes little to any philosophical consistency. Politically, it is true, he has held steady while former comrades ‘sank into disillusion, veered to ultra-leftism, or collapsed ignominiously into the arms of the bourgeoisie’, as he once colourfully put it. His intellectual veerings and careerings have not affected his socialism. Much of the impact of his ...”

“... It then moves to Poland with a critical sketch of the beginning of Walesa’s Presidency – the former leaders of Solidarity ‘belabouring each other with rusty clubs’, amid potentially hopeful signs of a Thatcherite economy under his authoritarian rule. An account of its unthinkable sequel follows: the victory of the post-Communist Aleksander Kwasniecki ...”

“... one’s own direct experience of its subject-matter. I therefore make full use of mine, as a pupil at Shrewsbury School in the Fifties. In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench,* one-time headmaster of Eton, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals’. Another ...”

“... who said he knew what had provoked Crown Prince Dipendra, supposed incarnation of Vishnu and former pupil at Eton, to mass murder. On the night of 1 June 2001, Dipendra appeared in the drawing-room of the royal palace in Kathmandu, dressed in combat fatigues, apparently out of it on Famous Grouse and hashish, and armed with assault rifles and ...”

“... Van Dyck the Antwerp prodigy, precocious master of the northern baroque, Rubens’s star pupil, a painter of mythologies and altarpieces – not just of portraits. In England, where Van Dyck spent most of the last decade of his 42 years, the demand for other genres was limited but the appetite for portraits was voracious. He became, like Holbein ...”

“... associated with the Royal Ballet. One name was conspicuous by its absence: Liam Scarlett, the former Royal Ballet artist-in-residence. In March 2020, following accusations of inappropriate behaviour over the previous decade, the company had severed ties with him. Other companies followed suit. In April this year it was announced that Scarlett, who was ...”

“... assistants how to draw, and there are individual sheets which seem to show the work of master and pupil. The distinction between different hands is not always easy to make, and art historians tend to credit Michelangelo himself only with those elements that seem particularly confident and accomplished. This assumption may not necessarily be correct, because ...”

“... long room with incredibly neat bookshelves, I’d never seen so many books in my life.’ A former classmate quoted in the biography recalls that fellow pupils he occasionally helped over the small intricacies of language referred to him affectionately as ‘Dictionary’. Achebe senior had been a collector of all literary trivia. As the fifth in a ...”

“... there is Jan, a young man who has admired Kristýna since the time when he was her husband’s pupil and saw her waiting with Jana’s pram outside his school. When he happens to catch sight of her again 15 years later, his infatuation revives, and he begins to waylay her with bunches of flowers. They start an affair. She worries about being 15 years older ...”

“... and which fully justify their reissue in this expanded form. Elizabeth Wilson is a cellist (a pupil of Rostropovich) who lived and studied in Moscow for seven years in the late 1960s and early 1970s (her father, Duncan Wilson, was British ambassador for some of that period). By the time she went back to Russia at the end of the 1980s to conduct her ...”

“... own history, and he means to write them back in. He draws vividly on interviews with musicians, former child soldiers, political activists and people old enough to remember the days of the Belgian Congo, including a man who claimed (plausibly) to be 126 years old. Congo, Van Reybrouck insists, is more than the ‘world’s storehouse’: it has ‘played a ...”

“... from state socialism was among the smoothest in Eastern Europe. Hungary spent the 1990s as a model pupil of the West, finally joining the EU in 2004. Now, almost a decade on, it is led by the charismatic, self-declared ‘right-wing plebeian’ Viktor Orbán, a man whom critics charge with the ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Thanks to his government’s ...”

“... was the Salvator Mundi, a serene and ringletted image of Christ formerly considered the work of a pupil or imitator, but now – after restoration, analysis and a substantial helping of hype – attributed to the brush of the master. No sooner had this excitement died down than the long-running saga of Leonardo’s lost mural The Battle of Anghiari was back ...”