“... routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his enthusiasm he wrote that climbing ‘made all other sports seem trivial’, and in Goodbye to All That he records a fine physical image of the well-being that ...”

“... One was age: the old, left as well as right, were far more likely to vote for Brexit than the young. But another division, just as pronounced, was education: whether or not someone had gone to university was one of strongest indicators of voting behaviour in the referendum (just under 70 per cent of university graduates voted Remain). Yet a degree has ...”

“... afraid of him. But even if that statement is suspect the circumstances it summarises are not. When young, one of the King’s sons was ill-treated, another had his digestion ruined for life, and all were forced to wear splints to prevent them being knock-kneed. They were lamentably ill-educated, and all showed signs of nervous tension which stemmed from ...”

“... was master in his own house whereas Kasmin had a backer, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a young Guinness heir. Another was that Fraser lacked the experience in running a gallery that Kasmin had. Born in 1934, Kasmin had worked from 1956 to 1958 at Gallery One under Victor Musgrave, a true pioneer who in the 1950s was the first dealer in London to show ...”

“... not only Mary and Karl, but an infant son, who is almost immediately carried off by a stranger. Young Karl leaves Argus almost immediately, but Mary remains. One winter day when she is at school, Mary is involved in a miracle. In a playground accident her face hits the ice covering the ground, and in that ice, at the point of impact, appears the likeness of ...”

“... in between about Britishness, heroism and the purpose of exploration. Now, another ten years on, David Crane has produced a huge new biography, five years in the researching, no document left unexamined, which aims to reassess the achievements and failures of Captain Scott. Crane wants to lose the underlying political motivations of Huntford’s and ...”

“... turned into permanent exile. His first novel, In the Country of Men (2006), dramatises a young boy’s turmoil when both his neighbour and father are arrested in Tripoli by Gaddafi’s secret police. In his second, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), a son and a glamorous stepmother, with whom the young man is ...”

“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... body is much inclined to allow large claims for writers’ special status. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which, as a student, the narrator had felt was talking directly to her, leaves her students cold. They accuse Rilke of ‘excluding them. They say it’s a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it’s ...”

“... the 1919 Exhibition of Modern French Art. Their snooty irreverence had made postwar England feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done ...”

“... had invented a brand new version of his own. Exciting times? You bet. Of course, I was young and flying without any background to keep me from floating away on the wings of misunderstanding, but judging by the practical results of Laing’s theory and his own life’s progress, my reasoning on the basis of what I read may not have been too far off ...”

“... of religious truths to a dispersed public audience from the emotional intimacy dramatised in Young’s Night Thoughts. (The ‘Mr Fairly’ with whom Fanny Burney had what is for Guest a paradigmatic conversation about Young at Court in the 1780s was Col. Stephen Digby, the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain.) It is a tribute ...”

“... of Days (1914). On the outbreak of war he managed to get himself attached to the staff of Sir David Henderson, then commanding the Royal Flying Corps, and after some difficulty in donning his uniform (‘Six people endeavoured to put on my puttees; none of them were entirely successful, except finally in the evening. Sir ...”

“... The Frankish poet Angelbert declares his devotion to the emperor by saying: Vatis Homerus amat David – ‘Homer the poet [i.e. Angelbert!] loves David.’ The admiration of these poets for their Classical predecessors, especially Virgil, can lead to something little better than pastiche (though that may itself be ...”

“... and middle-aged reviewers – some of whom actually took Thirlwell to task for the crime of being young – that one badly wanted to warm to its refreshingly callow, hectoring and capacious take on the history of fiction. Sadly, Miss Herbert was not what it seemed, and over the long (600-page) haul Thirlwell’s mild nostrums about the primacy of world over ...”