“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the heroine of her first novel, The Unlit Lamp, and the character to whom these words refer. The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were ‘aggressively intelligent ... not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who did things well ... women who counted and who would go on counting ... They ...”

“... read for a long time. It tells the story of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it one of the world’s largest 50 private corporations). The ...”

“... by a friend’s small press, it’s an apprentice work about a day in the life of a disturbed young literary man, Arthur Maxley, whose psychological problems seem at first to centre on his father (‘Father, Father, Father, he said to himself. What an ugly word’). In the end, it’s revealed that his bipolar mother, who shot herself, is to blame. When ...”

“... In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the illegal shipment of 25,000 rifles and ...”

“... 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 volume of annotations to Ulysses, ‘he returned with his friend J.F. Byrne late at night to Byrne’s house at 7 Eccles ...”

“... was to discover when I took part in the negotiations as a legal adviser. Incidentally, I remember Edward Said coming to Washington to offer his services to the delegation only to be sent away. He could have played a crucial role, explaining to the American public what these negotiations were about. What sort of leadership refuses an offer like ...”

“... newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily Proustian anatomisation ...”

“... that these were callous and selfish and at least four out of the 20 fall into this category. ‘Edward’ (who concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who ...”

“... in the warrior bands of the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded Rome. The military service of young aristocrats in a lord’s household coincides with the beginnings of vassalage as described by Bloch, originating in an atmosphere heavy with the odour of household bread. The world of chivalry was a world where men were linked to each other by strong ...”

“... habits – keeping the grown-ups at home in the evenings in front of their sets and driving the young out to the cinema and the pubs – and has revolutionised electioneering and other forms of marketing. It is equally a matter of common observation that sound radio retains a role, even if it is only to provide something – anything – to listen to for ...”