“... illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In 1881 the Haggards had returned to Britain, leaving their fellow settlers to buy and sell the veldt for what it would fetch, or dig vast holes in search of gold and diamonds. Haggard had then ...”

“... Monterrey cigars and giant spiders; a menacing black servant with eyes glowing like coals; a naked young woman supine on a stone altar, breasts heaving, knife raised over her throat. But only a minority of his novels involve devil-worship; Baker’s title ties together the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social ...”

“... between the monks at Whitby and Durham; by 1670 it was a farming hamlet of 90 people. But when Edward Pease’s Stockton and Darlington Railway was having problems exporting coal from Stockton – the River Tees was too shallow at that point for ships to get through – they chose to extend the line to Middlesbrough, where the Tees was deeper. The ...”

“... with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their stars, no longer occupy the same place in our imaginations. ‘Remember River ...”

“... study lies largely in the unfolding inevitability of this morality tale. The movement from the young Maudling, working genially alongside Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell in the late 1940s – Rab Butler’s three brilliant young men, all potential prime ministers – to the later figure, greedy, corrupt, drinking himself ...”

“... anatomised Isherwood with a typically cold eye: Stripped, I am no Adonis. My body looks fairly young because it is soft and not heavily muscled. My shoulders are narrow, and my hips too big. Nevertheless, as long as I hold myself well and remain full-face to the audience, my figure looks passably good – or, at least, quite cosy to lie on. When I turn ...”

“... when she eats it, the flame of love for Ivan flares in her heart. Ugrešić’s Ivan is Mevlo, a young masseur at the beauty farm, he is a Bosnian orphan with a heart of gold, who has suffered from a permanent erection ever since a bomb exploded beside him in Sarajevo. He will find the egg, and there will be a beautiful future for him too ...”

“... to change a plug or drive a car.His school-leaving prize, which he chose for himself, was G.M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. His turn towards history, and towards its Victorian legacy, was beginning. No other book made such an impact on him. ‘It was an inspired choice,’ Sisman writes, ‘for it was a work that Asa would refer to ...”

“... and ignorant, patriotic, white-feather-giving women, and the ‘Old Men who sacrificed the young with such complacency’. The story has become even oppressively familiar: so much so that one begins to wonder if it is not false, and actually in some minor ways I think that it is false, at least in implication. The chief trouble, though, lies elsewhere ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... art, hybrid, impure, heterogeneous, visionary, obscene, dangerous, self-contradictory, chaotic? Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism cites Blake’s remark in its early pages in order to mediate an assertion and a denial. The assertion is that culture is a crucial factor in the desire to found and maintain imperial regimes; the denial is that this fact ...”

“... is explicit sympathy for the old dying alone, for exploited husbands and overworked wives, for the young with their fragile illusions: but it is all cold comfort. ‘They’ are marched up and down their streets without much sensitivity, either imaginative or metrical; the flat caps are matched by a flat-footed rhymeless pentameter. Dunn reproaches himself in ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... central argument is simple enough. Long before the acknowledged masterpieces of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, long before the English reached their nonsensical apogee in the reign of Victoria, a few privileged Elizabethans were already developing a surreal and proto-Carrollean sense of humour, cultivated most often in the elaborately flippant literary games ...”

“... had already proved impossible: in 1553, the last year of the reign of Elizabeth’s brother, Edward VI, an English expedition had tried to sail to China round the north of Russia. Most of the sailors froze to death near present-day Murmansk, but some of them made it to Moscow, where they struck a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible – nearly as good as a ...”