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“... Forster was acutely conscious of this. He began the book when a friend of Edward Carpenter’s, George Merrill, touched his backside ‘gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It ...”

“... and bills of sale, Marks and his team of researchers unearthed some unexpected gems. The diary of George Hunter White, a dead Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was particularly startling. White had worked as Gottlieb’s fixer in the underworlds of New York and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held ...”

“... a fairly short book offering traditional English complaints against the United States. The hero, George Gidner, goes to Dakota in 1929, leaving his teaching job in Bradford to attempt something similar in the Wild West. Sneeringly the narrative describes the girls he left behind him. ‘Mr Gidner seems sort of exalted since he landed that plush Yankee ...”

“... with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its effect on Coleridge. He atones for it by an ...”

“... whether Telford’s was the first to be constructed primarily in iron; it now seems that the tiny Holmes Aqueduct on the Derby Canal, has priority. If the Longdon aqueduct is not ‘an ugly thing’, it certainly isn’t competing in a beauty pageant. It has none of the grandeur of Pontcysyllte: its fascination is in its plainness, its modesty, innocent of ...”

“... sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its ...”

“... fans’ highest expectations. In American letters I can compare Thomas only with Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the one whom Americans think of first). But although both were medical professors and, in their time, deans, their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already ...”

“... shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as an unsavoury mix of the ...”

“... sex. Alger Hiss was not exactly a patrician but he had been a law clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he had been one of the bright boys of the Roosevelt New Deal and he had been energetic and instrumental in setting up two of the pillars of the postwar liberal American imperial order – the United Nations and the Carnegie Endowment for International ...”

“... Nunn, a former head of the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee, the former secretary of state George Schultz, the former secretaries of defence Bill Perry and Jim Mattis, and even Henry Kissinger, none of whom had any knowledge of haematology or phlebotomy, but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s ...”

“... of Lake Geneva. Byron and Polidori were up the hill at the Villa Diodati. During what Richard Holmes in his biography of Shelley calls ‘a spell of bad weather in the last fortnight of June’, the two households stayed up late into the night at the Villa Diodati, telling ghost stories and discussing galvanism as the lightning struck outside. Godwin ...”

“... name on the list of petitioners is genuinely surprising. It is ‘G. Hunsdon’: none other than George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, the current patron of the play company whose livelihood the petition was threatening. Laoutaris, never one to underplay the situation, calls this ‘one of the most astounding acts of betrayal in theatrical history’, though there ...”

“... winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that ...”

“... soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling ...”