“... that myself, at the age of four, could identify by name any or all of the coloured plates in Edward Step’s Wayside and Woodland Blossoms ... not content with the English names, I memorised many of the Latin and Greek ones as well. Some of these (at the age of eight) I conceitedly incorporated in a school essay ... The headmaster read the essay aloud to ...”

“... the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual. ‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would ...”

“... For a Russian soldier, the Caucasus was the warm, southern equivalent of Scott’s Highlands: an Edward Waverley from Moscow or St Petersburg might expect adventure, romance, intrigue, death. The mountains of the region were fabled (Noah’s ark was supposed to have passed through the twin peaks of Mount Elborus). Beyond the natural border of the River Terek ...”

“... was formed in Natal in 1896 to resist further ‘Asiatic’ (meaning Indian) immigration; the young Gandhi found himself classified as a ‘coolie lawyer’. In Kenya Colony, white settlers threatened armed violence if no limits were set to the influx of Indians, who were soon providing not only manual labour but almost the whole retail and services ...”

“... to have hobbies like gardening and cooking. This advice struck me as sound and I commend it to young writers. Thom, who was often compared to Auden on account of being queer, famous and an English expatriate poet living in America, met Auden at least once. They didn’t particularly get along. Thom wasn’t at all catty about other poets ...”

“... Frank Johnson, restored to the back page of the Times after a disappointing sojourn abroad, and Edward Pearce of the Daily Telegraph, are representative of the sketch-writing-as-entertainment school. McKie is more thoughtful. The political team on the Guardian is powerful. Its front-runner for many years was Ian Aitken (by Tribune out of the Beaverbrook ...”

“... Although this section features two well-endowed male characters, the chief presence is that of a young, feeble girl, referred to as Ukifune, or Floating Bark, who cannot choose between two people who love her. It is this section, dominated as it is by the Buddhist belief in karma, that comes closest to a modern novel in its psychological depth. The ...”

“... of his first meeting with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. At that moment, in the spring of 1911, young Bert Lawrence – an exceptionally talented, neo-romantic, vaguely Swinburnean, vaguely Hardyesque schoolteacher-poet-novelist – became the intense and idiosyncratic ‘Lorenzo’ who wrote Women in Love and was in many ways a real-life double of Rupert ...”

“... gave some 8.4 million women the vote (compared to 12.9 million men) but excluded precisely those young women whose war work politicians were citing as the reason for their conversion to the cause. No one really pretends that this silly compromise, or even the 1918 election at which women first cast their votes, is the true focus of current interest. Neither ...”

“... explained to Darwin that this first translation of any of his work into Greek, undertaken by a young Cretan doctor, Meliarakès, had not been without risk. It required considerable ‘moral courage’ for Meliarakès openly to support such a scientific approach to humans in a country ‘still under the rule of dogmatism’.At home Darwin came under fire ...”

“... enough to read the historian Ibn Khaldun, who was active in the 14th century. Crucially for the young Kilito, culture itself in those days was coloured French; colonial cringe meant that for a long time literature wasn’t considered worthy of the name in the Middle East and North Africa unless it fitted into the European tradition (the US didn’t set the ...”

“... and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a ...”

“... away; the meek shall inherit the earth; tender mercies; clean hands and a pure heart; I have been young and now am old; my cup runneth over; many a time; clean gone; the days of old; I am a worm and no man; his heart’s desire; the heavens declare the glory of god; go down to the sea in ships; at their wits’ end; the valley of the shadow of death; make a ...”

“... its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by Philip Johnson in 1964, the ...”