“... smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael Gordin’s book helps to explain the action’s symbolism and its violence. Blok’s father-in-law, the desk’s first owner, was the greatest of Russian chemists, Dmitrii Mendeleev, who died in 1907 at the age of 73. Mendeleev had put himself at the ...”

“... on a chain and a black and white photograph was pressed into the frame. It was of her husband, Michael, dead for 35 years by then and sorely missed. My education in guilt began there. It was where I first heard the words ‘the bad fire’, a place for boys who didn’t finish their soup or failed to close the door of the outside loo. I don’t think I ...”

“... the Film Festival world, the prestige sector of the industry which nurtured a stream of ambitious young directors, many of whom had been directly influenced by Godard – Akerman, Bertolucci, Wenders – but who never abandoned their audiences as irrevocably as he did. Akerman and Wenders found their niche and stuck to it, Bertolucci pulled back after 1968 ...”

“... the Microsoft e-mail service, Hotmail. The early story of this company is told by Po Bronson. Two young would-be entrepreneurs, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bahtia, ‘had been brainstorming possible business ideas for a few months’. One of their problems was not being able to exchange information over e-mail while at their respective workplaces, because they ...”

“... overcome the greater, whether to shed innocent blood as the price of breaking humanity’s chains. Michael Scammell has devoted more than 20 years of his own life to producing this tremendous, absorbing biography, hoping to restore Koestler and his work to new generations. It was a bold thing to take on. In the first place, Koestler wrote two books – Arrow ...”

“... by Mrs Beeton at every turn, perhaps even after they had been many years in service. Of course young wives, or Esther Summer-son-style dependent relatives, were equally ignorant when they first took up their duties of household management. But they at least had a copy of the book; they read it; and they were the normal conduit by which the knowledge in it ...”

“... front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I ...”

“... the principal agent of order in such establishments, was a time-honoured instrument for training young minds, hence the disquieting ambiguity of ‘discipline’, a word that in Shakespeare’s day could even denote the principal weapon of instruction: the whip. In his essay ‘Of the Institution and Education of Children’, Montaigne, who grew up speaking ...”

“... was quite a lot to blame for the phenomenon of A.A. Milne and Pooh Bear, when they were very young. The atmosphere of enlightened upper-middle-class fun and games, in a new world where to be young was very heaven, suffuses Rupert Brooke’s life and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of ...”

“... in 1995. Mossbourne’s first head, or ‘principal’ as they are often called in academies, was Michael Wilshaw, who subsequently became chief inspector at Ofsted.Both City and Mossbourne began with a single cohort of Year 7s (11 and 12-year-olds) before building up to a full school and sixth form after seven years, which gave their heads time to decide how ...”

“... their heads and complained of the ‘bad Bengali’ – ‘the language does not taste well.’ Michael Datta (Madhusudan Datta, 1824-73), who took the name ‘Michael’ on his conversion to Christianity, was highly regarded as an innovator in Bengali blank verse and for his elevated Miltonic style. But he was never a ...”

“... agreeable pictures: recent purchases include a very neat, pretty oil painting of the shop of John Young and Sons, fishmongers, by the 19th-century Swiss artist Jacques-Laurent Agasse (the Queen owns his best-known picture, which is of a giraffe) and Compulsory Obsolescence, a meticulous drawing by Michael Landy in which he ...”

“... It hit the big time a while ago, with sought-after interviews with the Stone Roses and George Michael (‘breaking a six-year silence’). Guest editors have included Damien Hirst and David Bailey – Big Issue chic. The ads say something, too: Levis, Sony, Calvin Klein, Bacardi; British Nuclear Fuels, a contentious issue in the office, soon pulled; some ...”

“... the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s like a modern memorandum or a press release. Young Glen, though he can’t be so young today, had a good ghost writer in Pete Silverton. I guess that Pete pretty accurately represents Glen’s voice, as well as his ambitions. In the words of the blurb, ‘Matlock ...”

“... matters between the writing of the two books. Some identifications remain: in 1970 as in 1964, the young man addressed in the Sonnets is the Earl of Southampton, not, as some still think, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or ...”