“... most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall. I ate and drank with Russell for five years, often wondering what he was for and how on earth he had got to where he had from our common starting point in a Dublin suburb. Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP ...”

“... of Latin at University College London; the abrupt appearance of A Shropshire Lad four years later (no mention in the surviving letters about writing or assembling poems), its slow take-off then rapid ascent; his election in 1911 as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge; his separate apotheoses as scholar and poet. Apart from a sabbatical term in 1934, he ...”

“... was an unsuccessful play in 1961, which gave her years of writer’s block) meant that she had no readerly expectations to live up to. Most readers encountered Molly Keane as a new writer, and even those who knew the connection with M.J. Farrell weren’t quite sure what it meant. The journalist Maureen Cleave wrote to Keane that the earl of ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... excluded from the opera. A majestic outdoors, the forest, and a vast sanctified indoors, the Grail Hall, are its two positive locations (the negative ones, Klingsor’s domain, being a castle tower and a garden of dangerous flowers). To be sure, Act One has water just offstage:a lake to which the wounded king is brought for his hydrotherapy, and a spring where ...”

“... somewhat belatedly, they did Leslie Stephen. (He eventually resigned his fellowship at Trinity Hall, and we now learn that he may have been brought near to suicide.) Not that life was always so thrilling; Stephen, in fact, found Cambridge dull. ‘The only persons I thoroughly liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs ...”

“... she seems to mimic her. Charlotte Mew may have grown up to be secretive – she was certainly no party-goer – but she wrote quite freely about her childhood, directly in prose, obliquely in her poems. She enjoyed nursery life: in some ways she never got over it. ‘I like you best when you are small,’ says a would-be lover, in her poem ‘On the Road ...”

“... mock modesty but a true representation of how he sees himself and chooses to be seen by others – no ordinary chemist, mind you, but the supremo of British chemistry for very many years and a figure of world rank as well. He is a Nobel Laureate and a peer and has been President of the Royal Society and the Head of a Cambridge College; he has earned, too, what ...”

“... Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO’ in cadence as Allen read it. In spite of all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before – we had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. Ginsberg himself was in tears, ‘driving ...”

“... are not pursued with the fervour they once were by the organs of the right: the Telegraph no longer runs a ‘Beebwatch’ column, and though the tabloids lambast the BBC’s attempts at diversity, few have recently campaigned for its privatisation.Such grumblings have been displaced by two interrelated arguments: first, that the licence fee is ...”

“... history or papyrology, but from the words and the verse form of the poems themselves:There is no other poetry in the world as smooth and rapid as this epic poetry, in which the ideas of the particular passage seem fitted so perfectly, and yet so compactly, to the hexameter framework. And this smoothness is due, of course, to the use of a traditional ...”

“... then fled through the backstreets. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured.In no other Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded in such an audacious attack. Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was ordered to execute civilians at the rate of ten for every German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... to be one of the most widely photographed spacecrafts in history,’ Armstrong said. ‘That was no doubt due to the fact it was so photogenic. Its true beauty, however, was that it worked. It was tough, reliable and almost cuddly.’ In front of Aldrin is his shadow, a set of footprints, and part of one of the lunar module’s four footpads wrapped in ...”

“... and urban regeneration, derives in one way or another from the TV programmes, but there are no photographs or screenshots. Some of the pieces look like composites, and there is a lot of repetition. No matter: it’s a joy to read. What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ...”