“... 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 ...”

“... their voices.Peter, now nine, went back to Gezira Preparatory School where, according to Edward Said, a fellow pupil, lessons were ‘mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved.’ Equally baffling was the tradition of celebrating the ...”

“... was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned down on religious grounds by the first great love of his life, the daughter of a great Anglican family. In the aftermath of this rejection, he thought ‘a definitely agnostic atmosphere is essential for my free development of work and of ...”

“... 1760s, is often said to be a portrait of Barber. It shows a fine-featured, rather dreamy-looking young man in three-quarters profile, with a high forehead and finely curled black hair somewhat receding at the temples. If this is a portrait of him, it is in at least one respect an idealised image – the skin is smooth, with none of the markings of ...”

“... the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I ...”