“... precisely from the skill with which he has blocked off implication and afterthought. Long ago, Robert Bridges observed about one of Keats’s lines that ‘it displayed its poetry rather than its meaning.’ That was once a criticism, certainly, but neither the old nor the new Decorated styles are subject to the censure that attends the absence of meaning ...”

“... understood. His poem ‘The Hoard’ follows successive owners from elf to dwarf to dragon to young warrior to old miser, all poisoned by their greed. In The Hobbit he calls avarice ‘dragon-sickness’: you catch it from the gold itself. Ogden’s book is a splendid guide to the development of the dragon over more than two millennia, and it’s almost ...”

“... of junked cars. This is the Avery family’s salvage yard, where the incinerated remains of a young photographer called Teresa Halbach were discovered in November 2005. Steven Avery and his 17-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey were found guilty of Halbach’s murder in 2007, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years after the quashing of his ...”

“... authors write in a lifetime. (Most of my books are ones he ought to have written.) I imagine the young Michael I never met, the Thin Man, somewhat like the young Coleridge in unstoppable verbal flow as he tramped the Lakeland fells – a spectacle that those who met the poet in middle age, histrionic and bedridden at Dr ...”

“... It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad ...”

“... would come to resent Auden’s tendency always to think of him as he had when they were both young, as though he had never grown up, but Spender himself returned repeatedly to those days as though to some rite of passage. In World within World (1951), the memoir he published while still only in his early forties, Spender gives the encounter the force of ...”

“... and the square memorial stone put up by Godwin to Mary still standing. This was where Shelley and young Mary did their wooing; the bones beneath it were moved to Bournemouth when the railway was cut through in the 1860s, but the monument remains. When I started to research Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, her books were hard to find outside the British and ...”

“... begins with a most effective Eliotian part-quotation, conflating Shakespeare’s ‘When I was young (as yet I am not old)’ with the Psalmist:‘I have been young and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken.’ I have been young, and now am not too old; And I have ...”

“... in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert Dingley, to whose learning this review is much indebted, has identified it as one by the Russian artist Karl Brullov; it shows, in the sentimental fashion of the time, a series of pathetic incidents during the destruction of Pompeii. A year later, Bulwer ...”

“... and savage), which set it apart from dreary state-approved literature. (At the time, like many young people, I read the newly translated work of Western writers, such as Kafka and Dostoevsky, and ignored most of what was promoted by the state.) Ma’s novella strained the tolerance of the cultural bureaucracy; his work was condemned for ‘distorting and ...”

“... that cannot be done on two wheels. On the last page of this opulent book is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of ...”

“... so, despite the succeeding flurry of anti-sweatshop publicity, in which Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich also took part, it came as no surprise that, a year later, New York labour officials raided a sweatshop (producing Kathie Lee Gifford and other lines) that was paying workers less than the minimum wage. The garment industry’s darkest days are being ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”

“... once saw Eric as the ideal baptismal name, to the ultimate dismay of its recipients. Of Eric Gill, Robert Speaight says that being called Eric ‘might not unfairly be described as starting life with a handicap’. The Great War showed what handicapped Erics were made of; in 1918 my cousin Eric, up from Biggin Hill in a two-seater fighter, overhauled ...”

“... He served as the director of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos, reporting directly to Robert Oppenheimer. After the war, he returned to Cornell, but he remained active as a consultant to the nuclear weapons programme, as well as to the budding nuclear power industry. In 1947, Bethe was asked to tackle the problem of shielding for nuclear ...”