“... job at McDonald’s. Instead of perfecting his entrepreneurial pluck the fire-breathing young conservative (at Marquette he had displayed a photo of himself with Ronald Reagan in his dorm room) devoted himself entirely to Republican electoral politics. Here, too, he started out as a failure, running a doomed state legislative campaign in a mainly ...”

“... Marshall’s account) were left-wingers, supporters of John Wilkes and Horne Tooke: but the young Godwin was a Tory. Most of the others saw the absurdity of believing in a loving God who tortured his less competent adherents after death, endlessly, though some thought the fable useful for keeping the lower classes in order: but the ...”

“... was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological strains of legitimising ...”

“... Medawar and Billingham published their discovery in Nature – a time-lag that today’s thrusting young scientific Turks would consider so cautious as to verge on professional suicide. However, the existence of immunological tolerance gave scientists and doctors both a practical and – Medawar insists – a moral boost, for people were beginning to believe ...”

“... opposing elements – pacifists and fire-eaters, reformers and die-hards, rich and poor, old and young. When they meet each other they generally make friends, and when they make friends they can find some of the solutions to their problems.’ In Nancy’s view, there could be no harm in inviting Ribbentrop for musical chairs, because there was no chance ...”

“... a world of imagination in which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgments were shown to matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious. It’s pity that this ...”

“... called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a brisk-moving young Portuguese priest. He is taking a picture of her? She wore her black jumpsuit that morning, so she fits the dress code for Ladies from the ankles up, but she alone in the Sistine Chapel is wearing Birkenstocks. ‘That’s what she should be ...”

“... been his into her creative lair – nine feet square of dense, paint-flecked, Crazy Glue squalor. Francis Bacon’s famously naff South Ken studio (now re-created in a Dublin museum) is a neatnik’s in comparison. Tracey Emin’s Bed? Pristine and fresh-smelling. The mess is still intact; my mother stopped using the room ages ago but never cleared it ...”

“... Jansson published the first book in 1945, introducing readers to the collected family comprised of young Moomintroll and his parents, the Snorkmaiden, Little My, Sniff and Snufkin. The Moomins achieve something it would be difficult to find in adult literature: they are heroes, and they are deeply, profoundly strange. Their strangeness is accepted without ...”

“... asks Hingley, querying de Mallac’s rather coy observation that his hero, like the young Tolstoy, ‘was not above calling on ladies of easy virtue,’ and that this ‘will be documented by some later, less bashful biographer’. But can it be? asks Hingley. There is no evidence one way or another. De Mallac’s suggestion is illustrative of ...”

“... man succeeds and routinises the charisma of the original leader: Brother Elias taking over from St Francis, Bullinger from Zwingli, Beza from Calvin, Brigham Young from Joseph Smith, the Khalifa Abdullahi from the Mahdi, Philip Feldman from Father Kowalski and Maria Kozlowska (in the Polish Mariavite Church); or even Saul of ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... of wine o’clock. Then in 2009 she wrote a second memoir, The Last Supper, in which she takes her young family on a three-month voyage to Italy. It’s a very strange book indeed, with the look of having been written fast and to a daily word count – far too much noodling about pizza and gelati, some imprudently sharp sketches of fellow tourists, one of whom ...”

“... was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near Romford, was described by the Cambridge scholar Walter Haddon as a ‘little university’, and here they learned Greek, Latin, French and ...”

“... for realism. What about the real? In a short scene in Nabokov’s incest-filled novel Ada, the young hero, Van, visits the shop of Mrs Tapirov, another copyist: people bring her objets d’art and antique furniture and she makes faithful reproductions of them. Van has brought something for Mrs Tapirov to copy; significantly, he doesn’t remember, as he ...”