“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... know. I pick my way carefully back, cheered up no end.Later we watch God’s Own Country, about a young and unhappy shepherd in Yorkshire who takes on a Romanian immigrant and is emotionally educated by him, learning to care as much for his fellow man as he does for his sheep. It’s a bleak film, shot somewhere above Keighley I imagine, the farmhouse ...”

“... drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build.’Joyce’s friend John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new ...”

“... reading in Picture Post (and probably at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite ...”

“... up a good fight. It’s not surprising to learn that Hughes especially admired the paintings of Francis Bacon, with their spattered bodies twisting about and screaming defiantly despite their homely prisons. As one of Hughes’s poems has it, ‘Life is Trying to be Life’; but then, as the poem continues, ‘Death also is trying to be life.’ Who will ...”

“... other ‘things’, is very deft. What would Clark make of Renoir’s Mademoiselle Lacaux or the Young Girl at the Piano (to cite two of his most exquisite paintings, one lent by Cleveland and the other by Chicago to the recent Hayward Gallery exhibition)? The handmade dress which is a foil for the clean and well-bred mademoiselle, and the mahogany ...”

“... had already made all the intellectual innovations that Burckhardt ascribed to the Renaissance. St Francis, not Petrarch, discovered Nature; scholastic philosophers like Nicole Oresme, not Leonardo da Vinci, devised the principles for a new natural science; Hugh of St Victor, not Pico della Mirandola, celebrated the dignity of man. Panofsky proved more than ...”

“... call the dolce stil nuovo, the ‘sweet new style’ inflected by the Provençal troubadours. The young Dante exchanged sonnets and canzoni with fellow poets such as Guido Cavalcanti, each vying to surpass his peers in formal intricacy and praise of his lady. Their poetics required a donna angelicata, often more symbol than person. As a pretext for the ...”

“... had a script, he believed in it – and he worked to get everything settled that he could. Freddie Francis (cinematographer): We met on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his first big film. I’d been making them for a long time, this film and that film, and Harry Salzman, the film’s producer, knew me well enough. So when Karel took on Saturday Night, Harry ...”

“... day in 1944, at Los Alamos, Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, called in the young physicist Luis Alvarez to ask him if there was some technological means to determine if the Germans were operating plutonium-producing reactors. Alvarez invented a filtering device to be carried in the nose of an aircraft to detect xenon-133, a gas emitted ...”

“... splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum ...”

“... that make the most exciting showing at the Academy. Though he worked in Scotland as a boy and a young man, and later pioneered the tours of Wales that became such a standby for artists in search of the picturesque and sublime, his real heartland was – at least on the showing of this exhibition – the Home Counties: Windsor, Virginia Water, Luton Hoo, the ...”

“... and decide the case, another of Somersett’s pro bono counsel, the legal scholar and antiquary Francis Hargrave, quoted Cartwright’s case in his argument (at least, he put it into the account of his argument in the report which he edited, admitting engagingly that it was not actually the speech he had delivered in court). But once the quotation was ...”

“... Caribbean well, and had visited the Panama region; Paterson himself had been in the Caribbean when young, though not in Darien. None of this seemed to count. Hope was what mattered. Paterson sold the Darien mirage to the company of Scotland, and the company sold it to the Scottish investors. The scheme had to succeed. In many Scottish minds, it had already ...”

“... stir in him as well; and according to Bartlett, it was a story he particularly cherished. In it, a young man, a seminary student, is walking in a wood on a spring evening that has suddenly turned icily cold and gloomy. The change of weather impels him to think of the terrible Russian past, and of a present filled with poverty and hunger, ignorance, anguish and ...”