“... Armageddon novel nudges its way into these less assertive pages through Tom Crick’s favourite pupil Price. Price is in trouble, like his master, because he has formed a club which insists that the point of history is that it is about to come to a stop:   ‘You know what your trouble is, sir? You’re hooked on ...”

“... picked up prostitutes, to embarrass them into admitting fault immediately. The Ramblin’ Man, a former cop who staged more than 150 crashes in Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, dealt almost exclusively in getting rammed by elderly drivers changing lanes. To blunt the impact, the squat-car’s trunk is often stuffed with tyres, sandbags or both. But since ...”

“... his first term after running a populist campaign against Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who for many epitomised the regime’s worst features – nepotism, cronyism and financial corruption. He enjoyed the support of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, who shared his deep distrust of the West and probably his ambition to pursue ...”

“... killed. But the real turn of the narrative comes with the favourite’s belated conversion by her former slave’s example: having begun her life in the harem by feverishly aspiring to please one man, only to fall passionately in love with another, she ends by longing for the death that would reunite her with her ‘beloved’ slave. The man who brought the ...”

“... and pointed to the conclusion later elaborated by Dr Bammel, who was in fact Stauffer’s pupil and his co-researcher after the war. Stauffer’s work is full of blunders, some of which were pointed out by Paul Winter, and he cannot be regarded as objective in this matter, given his well-documented pro-Nazi record before and during the war (see Ernst ...”

“... she was easily irritated by Ashton’s inability to keep time. But Ashton was her only male pupil in those days and she hung onto him. Through Rambert, Ashton met the socialites and artists he would associate with for the rest of his life. During the Twenties, when all-night parties, partner-swapping, drugs and drink characterised the lives of his wild ...”

“... of the Civil War were still vivid (‘we lived then’), Woolson struggled to do justice to the former enemy. One of her most successful tales of the period, ‘Rodman the Keeper’ (1877), concerns a Northern colonel posted to the Reconstruction South as the solitary ‘keeper’ of a Union graveyard and the grudging respect he gradually acquires for an ...”

“... of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men,’ the poet Imlac tells his pupil Rasselas. In what he chooses to see as the young boatman’s desire for learning, Johnson’s fantasy of the value of scholarly knowledge to common life is given momentary substance. This largely self-educated bookseller’s son, scarred by ...”

“... dramatically, that he had been cured of his troubles by messages sent across the Atlantic by a former patient. ‘Toward the end,’ he adds, ‘came violent paranoic and even homicidal outbursts.’ Ferenczi eventually died on 22 May 1933. In 1969, in the draft of an introduction to the journal that has only now been printed, Ferenczi’s ...”

“... cutting across them, were the bonds of ‘artificial kinship’, formed, for example, in tutor-pupil relationships (William taught Henry the art of chivalry). For much of the Middle Ages this relationship between nutritor and nutritus – which meant, in William’s case, that he, a relatively low-born knight, was master of his own lord – was of key ...”

“... for the review to be undertaken in the first place. The NCC’s chairman, David Pascall, is a former member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just ...”

“... the future modernist Lazar – later El – Lissitzky.) Not yet 20, Pen’s most energetic pupil left to continue his studies in St Petersburg. He secured a scholarship and after two years in the capital assimilating a sense of modernist art and experiencing himself as a ‘Jewish curiosity’, he returned to the maternal (and sisterly) warmth of ...”

“... system of dock briefs, into the mid-20th century, and not solely at the margins. In 1965, as a pupil barrister, I was briefed in forma pauperis to appear before the Privy Council on a petition for leave to appeal against a conviction for murder. In spite of palpable errors in the trial judge’s summing-up the petition was refused, as practically all ...”

“... and Ray-Bans, celebrated his election on a yacht provided by a media magnate, and is married to a former supermodel. The term bling-bling seems to have entered the French language just to describe the country’s head of state. As far as the business of government is concerned, the Fifth Republic’s unwritten motto, ‘Le président préside, le premier ...”

“... amalgamated Underground Electric Railways Company briefed the calligrapher Edward Johnston and his pupil Eric Gill to create a symbol and a typeface that would give visual identity to the unified network. The Johnston Sans lettering and red, white and blue roundel of the London Underground marked the beginning of a golden age. As well as the precisely detailed ...”