“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”

“... congenial than the already numerous official and professional studies. Lewis lost his mother very young, always got on badly with his father, though striving to be more or less filial, and acquired a curious mother-substitute or perhaps succubus as a result of active service in the First World War. This was Mrs Moore – her name has a coincidental ...”

“... local arts and crafts show (children’s class). This may be more than you want to know about the young Margaret Cook, but perhaps the nature of autobiography is precisely to tell you more than you want to know about another person with whom you are not presently infatuated. For reasons that doubtless have more to do with my childhood than my professional ...”

“... of a deeply felt need to keep things in the family at all costs. Gindin notes acutely that as a young man Galsworthy was ‘paralysed by a division between what he observed and what he felt he was expected to be’; and if there is a cluster of metaphors evident throughout this long book it is one of paralysis, stiffness, rigidity. The theory certainly ...”

“... other at length? As for the army of sniffing commentators: can no one remember how it is for the young woman confronting the older man, so seductively marked by experience, so essentially powerful, always knowing you better than you know yourself? The entire affair would, I imagine, have reminded them of their relations with Olga Kosakiewicz, who began as ...”

“... brayed a stentorian national call for the repression of pornography and for a ‘new generation of young people with clean minds and healthy bodies living in a better, cleaner America’. His exacting standards for FBI recruits – mandatory blond hair, blue eyes and slender waists – were of the Frederick the Great variety. And if you suspect what that may ...”

“... a hard trier. His twenties were probably the most successful decade in terms of public perception. Young, good-looking and rich in his own right with the income from the Duchy of Cornwall, he could, from a certain point of view, be seen as a prince for the swinging 1960s. After that the biographies chronicle a succession of increasingly difficult ...”

“... growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular retrospectives of Hollywood film noir, so I came to Bogart ...”

“... not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.’ One of these dull elves was Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, whose 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen captured the public’s imagination with its portrayal of Austen as the masterful miniaturist. Like her novels, Austen has always been read in different ways and Austen-Leigh took full advantage of the reading ...”

“... expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary Cook, who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England ...”

“... to belittle female musicians, a major concern was the effect singing church music might have on young men. A.H. Peppin wrote as late as 1927 that one music master he had recently interviewed suspected that ‘a great many of the boys and a good many of the masters’ regarded music with indifference, and some with ‘positive contempt’, since musicians as ...”

“... way to an obscure poet called William Cox Bennett. They surfaced again only when Bennett invited a young book collector to his lodgings in Camberwell for buttered toast and sausages. As the plates were cleared away and the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the collector – one Thomas James Wise – recognised the momentous find ...”

“... Kemble became as famous for her Falstaffs and Prosperos as for the heroines she played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any ...”

“... Burns the Radical (2002), which shows how the American Revolution formed his opinions when he was young, and shaped his expectations of the French Revolution. Patrick Scott Hogg would like Burns to have been an active member of the Dumfries branch of the radical group Friends of the People in 1793; he may have been, but the proof isn’t ...”

“... establish a seat of learning. ‘Father, I want you to build a university for the benefit of poor young men,’ he declares in the most affecting version, ‘so they can have the same advantages the rich have.’ For several months he remained physically with his distraught parents, pausing at select mortuaries as they made their way slowly back to the ...”