“... offer of a column on the Telegraph when he was proprietor. This was naturally embarrassing for Charles Moore, the editor, and annoying for the rest of the staff or, as Amiel puts it, a ‘small but vocal-in-corners group’ of them. Amiel sought the advice of William (Bill) Deedes, a former editor, a ‘seminal figure at the paper’ and all-round ...”

“... orator in Europe, and see him talk with his fingers,’ Talleyrand may have said: he was with Charles Fox and his deaf son, then at school in Hackney, a spin-off from Edinburgh. In the medium term Leipzig had the greatest influence, for it and the later German establishments became the home of the ‘pure’ oral method. In 1880, at a world congress in ...”

“... the strike. Pulling his many strings – among them Routledge’s editor at the Times, the late Charles Douglas-Home – he got commissions for articles about the coalfields which he wrote while engaged on reconnaissance missions. Hart spotted, and helped to sponsor, the rebels and working miners; he organised secret meetings, held MacGregor’s hand when ...”

“... discovery led Enrico Fermi in Rome to irradiate many different elements with neutrons in the hope that absorption of neutrons by their atomic nuclei would generate new radioactive elements. On irradiating the heaviest known elements, uranium and thorium, Fermi did indeed find radioactivities not ascribable to any known elements; he attributed some of ...”

“... in the physiognomies of the insane – although, as Janet Browne points out in her account of Charles Darwin’s encounter with this approach, it seems that what the psychiatrist could see in the photographs of madmen was simply not visible to the layman.) This separation means that even if we acknowledge the objectivity of a natural history of ...”

“... or dismissed as merely imaginary. The sincere man, the honest consciousness, had a reasonable hope of grasping it at last. But now Trilling finds himself confronted with a literature and a culture in which sincerity and the honest consciousness are only impotent survivals; and he comes to terms with that state of affairs in his last and finest ...”

“... in the same guileless way: undergraduate poets asked round to read him their verse in the hope that one thing might lead to another. However, on the day appointed it was not Miller who turned up but Kallman. Isherwood was in the next room when Auden came through and said: ‘It’s the wrong blond.’ The rest is history. Or literature. Or the history ...”

“... to a wide audience. Most publishers’ contracts have a clause about cartoon rights: let’s hope Gellner hasn’t signed his away. We literary critics are wiser. For us, seamless textuality makes the world, from Mallarmé to the News at Ten, indeterminate. Having read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we ...”

“... dreadfully unnerving to the young. Several virgins of my acquaintance went directly astray in the hope of becoming great dancers – a mistaken notion.’ One can see why virgins went astray. It is a splendid book, an inspiring book, doors and windows and eyes and arms wide open to the world (‘according to legend,’ de Mille says of Duncan’s childhood ...”

“... Stravinsky to Antibes (he didn’t come) to tutor her husband in harmony. (For a while, with no hope of succeeding on Broadway and still struggling to find his musical direction, Porter studied harmony, counterpoint and orchestration at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.) Linda’s first husband, also a Yalie, had the dubious distinction of being the first man ...”

“... In Ireland, for example, the cattle trade had been crippled by a British embargo from the days of Charles II. As well as the denial of religious and political rights, Burke inveighed against the restrictions on the export of linen, wool and beer which the Irish Parliament had been strong-armed to pass into law. Such impositions remind us of the ‘Unequal ...”

“... cheer Duke Leopold II of Tuscany subsequently made their way to the Piedmontese legation to cheer Charles Albert, the king of Sardinia-Piedmont, and finally, with their spirits fired up, marched into the Piazza Venezia, where the Austrian legation was situated. As the foreign overlords of Lombardy and Venetia and the conservative Catholic hegemon on the ...”

“... of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice. They outpolled Adams and his running mate, Charles Pinckney, but in order for Jefferson to become president, one or more Republican electors had to avoid voting for Burr. They failed to get the message. Jefferson and Burr both ended up with 73 electoral votes, sending the contest to the House of ...”

“... abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic prosperity that ‘true British rule’ promised. When such approaches were rebuffed, anticolonialism and independence gradually came to seem the more likely route towards self-rule and equality. But as late as the interwar period ...”

“... that very ugly skirmish with the dragoon Masi, probably instigated by the authorities in the hope of dislodging the Gamba family and their radical English associates from that part of Italy – could have done with more and sharper attention. In some ways, the second half of Seymour’s biography, dealing with Mary Shelley’s life between her ...”