“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... our social behaviour. The game? Nature v. nurture. That is a ‘convenient jingle of words’, as Francis Galton wrote in 1874, when he coined the dyad. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence that affects him after his birth. The distinction is clear: the one produces the infant such as it actually ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... of escaping. This was an essential ingredient of Miró’s originality. With the exception of Francis Picabia, who lived in the city for some time during the First World War, Miró had no peer group or set of interesting teachers. He worked out his advanced visual system alone, knowing that were anyone to see it, they would mock it. Thirty years ...”

“... when I was in the North Wing of St Pancras, I was sent to an experimental clinic for the young and depressed, but the clinic sent me back with a letter explaining that I was too disturbed and depressed for them to take me on. So my consultant put me on sleep therapy and every time I woke up, a nurse popped another barbiturate into my mouth, which I ...”

“... continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it was reissued by an American gay ...”

“... who takes his cue in this respect from Peter Demetz’s study of 1953) have made much of the young René Rilke’s Pre-Raphaelite affectations, his appearances in an abbé’s black habit on the Prague corso, giving away ‘to the poor’ copies of his first collection of poems; and it is a commonplace of this part of his biography that he was determined ...”

“... yet. Burns himself was never to win through to crazy age, with its ‘something yet’: he died young, at the age of 37 – en poète, as he put it – of a rheumatic affliction of the heart caused or assisted, it would seem, both by work and by drink. So you could say that he was never anything but young, and that his ...”

“... of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is not obvious why such names as Francis Coventry, Thomas Holcroft or Robert Paltock should be left out. (Not to mention James Boswell, author of Dorando.) The omission of John Cleland may be deliberate and provocative – it provokes me to cheerful assent – but Spender’s researches have ...”

“... from his verse, both excellent – Michael Hofmann’s for the NYRB Poets series and Matthew Francis’s New Selected Poems for Faber – the early work doesn’t get much of a showing, even though Graham retained a soft spot for it and made sure these poems were represented in the original Collected Poems that appeared towards the end of his life. ‘To ...”

“... 4. Correlation. This is the fundamental engine of the social sciences. It began around 1870, when Francis Galton devised the correlation coefficient. Quetelet had the mean, but Galton made deviation from the mean the core of his social philosophy, and so devised the correlation coefficient. We try to correlate autism with everything, not excluding the ...”

“... for what is now called ‘gentrification’, but which was then called ‘knocking through’. Young professional couples, many of them in journalism or television, bought up the houses, converted them and (an invariable feature of such conversions) knocked the basement rooms together to form a large kitchen-dining-room. In the mid-Sixties I wrote a BBC TV ...”

“... near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake’; the shilling’s later adventures include being exchanged for a shoulder of mutton, and getting clipped by a counterfeiter. The 18th century witnessed a mania for ‘it-narratives’, tales told from the perspective of money, corkscrews, lapdogs ...”