“... his most celebrated poems were written from literal translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”

“... to feel pain.’ And he goes on to credit the Victorian ‘revulsion from pain’ with ‘a major role, far transcending the narrow question of kindness to animals, in reshaping prevailing visions of the “good life” and the good society’. Indeed, it is to the same source that he attributes the present-day ‘pervasiveness of the so-called ...”

“... staffer of the Eye and co-published by the Eye. Reviewers? Auberon Waugh in the Daily Mail; John Wells twice, once in Harper’s and once in the Times; Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the ...”

“... Dickens, Hardy figure in almost every story of a life transformed by reading, along with the major poets (Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson), dramatists (none matched Shakespeare and Shaw in popularity), discursive prose writers (Carlyle and Ruskin are the constant companions of the earnest seeker after light), and the great unclassifiable, ...”

“... be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial affirmation for the marriage and, although 13 further births ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s ...”

“... he replied, ‘and it can be solved only by X-ray crystallography.’ The Great Sage was John Desmond Bernal, a flamboyant Irishman with a mane of fair hair, crumpled flannel trousers and a tweed jacket. We called him Sage, because he knew everything, from physics to the history of art. Knowledge poured from him as from a ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could ...”

“... the problem of the post-Beethovenian piano sonata: all three of his sonatas, together with the C major Fantasie op. 17 were first drafted at this time. And at the end of the decade came those highly original cycles of shorter pieces, including Kreisleriana, Kinderscenen and the Humoreske. The systematic expansion of Schumann’s creative activities which ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... Ellison the writer, whose achievement collapses, for practical purposes, into the fate of his one major novel. And, finally, detailed by Rampersad really for the first time, there is Ellison the board member, teacher and cultural authority. Writers about Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David ...”

“... and by the time the Catch-22 money was rolling in Heller was stepping out. Daugherty makes no major effort to list the women passing through Heller’s life but there seem to have been a lot of them. Heller’s daughter, who got the facts from her mother, cites them by category: ‘friends of hers, of theirs, students, writers, PR ...”