“... The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer ...”

“... offering an account both of her marriage and of the extraordinary circle of friends, including Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell and Saul Bellow, that Berryman gathered at this period. Berryman’s life can be summarised, albeit crudely, as follows: he was born in 1914, the son of John Allyn Smith, who died in 1926, apparently by ...”

“... not an easy thing to have on your conscience that you were personally responsible for putting Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last 24 years. You might think the last year, which has seen 32 murders, countless cases of rape, torture, arson and beating, all to help Mugabe steal an election, would have ...”

“... in the Essay on Criticism illustrates a different Neo-Classicism. Virgil is first imagined as a young poet, scorning ‘the Critick’s Law’ and drawing only ‘from Nature’s Fountains’. But later, says the next couplet,             when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. There is a tacit ...”

“... decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well ...”

“... With a loud bang and a dazzling burst of brilliance, the young genius, driven by an inner daemon, destroys the old order and erects a new one in its place. When the Origin was published, by contrast, Darwin was a placid, middle-aged country gentleman and doting paterfamilias, who described his own foremost scientific ...”

“... It will end in 2025, with the bicentenary of the end of the wars and the independence of Bolivia. Robert Harvey’s splendid book gives us the first large-scale narrative of Latin America’s struggle for independence in English since – well, when exactly? It is hard to think of any comparable attempt to come to grips with the whole vast story, and in such ...”

“... If so, how and why did they separate? And, finally, have they now been reconciled? Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel Bridge of 1930. The modern distinction, at its simplest, is that architects invent – draw or model the shapes they want materials to take – and engineers calculate how those shapes, when realised, would respond to the ...”

“... being roughed up by plainclothes police in Brixton Market. He took out paper and pen and got the young man’s name and address to make sure there was a record. Four officers intervened and threw Johnson, along with the young man, into the back of a police van, where two Black women were already being held. They were taken ...”

“... masterpiece, though she always hated hearing it referred to as such, The Death of the Heart. The young Eddie and the 16-year-old Portia live darkly and pungently in the non-individuated world in which they have found each other, keeping both convention and character at bay, leaving these threatening things to those who, like Thomas and Anna ...”

“... job for the FBI went pear-shaped when Sadie was accused of entrapment – she perhaps did entrap a young man by making him believe that she loved him and that they had to save the world by doing some light domestic terrorism – but as she tells us when recollecting the events leading up to the trial, she doesn’t blame herself. The Feds do, however, and ...”

“... source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the ...”

“... of farming out the office to substitutes at a profit. London was no longer infested by unbeneficed young preachers living on their grubby wits. The Morning Post had ceased to be edited by a gang of ‘parsonical banditti’ ever ready to fight duels in Hyde Park. Hunting parsons, shooting parsons and wrestling parsons were becoming figures of the past. To be ...”

“... a serious problem for a medical man with a family to support – and in saving the life of a young captain. What happened to Burns in no man’s land was intolerably disgusting as well as traumatic, and even Rivers – normally so ‘adept at finding bearable aspects to unbearable experiences’ – is nonplussed. Although by the end there seems some ...”

“... province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the ...”