“... is the inspiration for the married woman Félix loves, the countess Henriette de Mortsauf. Balzac read his novel to de Berny shortly before her death – and, like Félix, he wrote about their relationship in a long letter, in his case to the woman he would marry, Eveline Hańska. De Berny described the book as sublime, but suggested he temper some of Madame ...”

“... than scholar’, classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... of homosexuality mockingly set down. How could Paul Bailey (still known then by his given name of Peter) admit to being what his family called a pansy, or an Oscar Wilde. ‘I was a Battersea pansy, wary of displaying his true colours in the sunlight,’ since it was well known to the Baileys and their friends that there were no pansies in a decent ...”

“... IS SET RIGHT. Architects adore writing manifestos, the bigger the better, and even seem to buy and read them, if we are to judge by the number crowding the bookstore shelves. (In America, at least, they count as tax-deductible professional expenses.) A generation or two ago, these prophetic works were written in the language of the Futurists and the ...”

“... at this point the question arises: what is there, in this early life, that can be made much of? We read of changes of mood, from brief moments of elation to long days of gloom and depression; the theme ‘literature is death’ alternates with detailed hints on how to review your own short stories and novel and get your friends to put their names to the ...”

“... seditious and pessimistic work. Farewell to Europe is a sequel to The Missing Years. Having read the earlier novel less than a year ago, I was dismayed to find how little I remembered about it. To begin the new work was to recall why. Like its predecessor, it lacks fictional life because it is primarily an exercise in contemporary history. The Missing ...”

“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty ...”

“... into an ass. MacNeice weir quotes the passage in Marius the Epicurean in which Marius and Flavian read Apuleius’s book and relish his ‘unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches like Swift’s, and a genuine animal breadth’. Distinguishing between Apuleius’s syntax and Cicero’s, MacNeice doesn’t quite explain what the difference ...”

“... in disgracefully cowardly circumstances, when he was ejected by the then chairman of selectors, Peter May. It is necessary to know his approach to captaincy, which, as seen from the periphery, was the equivalent of riding a bike with your feet on the handlebars (he would argue that provided you don’t crash you would still get to the bottom of the hill ...”

“... the person of a king?’ ‘The King himself.’ To this extent, Prince Hal’s profligacy can be read as the son throwing the father’s imposture back in his face. The Donmar production wasn’t ‘giving the lie’ to the idea that this is a masculine play, as one reviewer suggested, or shifting the emphasis to the ‘similarity between the sexes’. In ...”

“... not an archive-man, and on this scale he couldn’t conceivably be one, but he is well and widely read, and has something to offer, even if it isn’t something of the highest quality, or anything that will refloat the subject in the historical mainstream. About the Jesuits’ missions in distant places, he says: ‘The one thing Jesuits almost always did in ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... a grasp of the whole, an eye for detail, and a sense of irony and wit that make them a pleasure to read. For histories of histories, time itself is capacious. Grafton’s practitioners were writing in the decades around 1600; he can treat them as mutually curious contemporaries. Burrow’s stretch across two and a half thousand years, but until 1700 or so, his ...”

“... and here and in A Modern Utopia (1905) Wells was conscious of his debt to Plato, whom he had first read as a teenager. He found Plato’s eugenics intellectually attractive, but soon began to doubt the scientific claims of Galton and Pearson. In 1903 he outspokenly condemned eugenic measures as wholly impractical (though not, G.K. Chesterton pointed out, as ...”

“... Truth that life illustrates to the life that embodies truth. The Pilgrim’s Progress, however, is read at length and with extraordinary consistency as a literal narrative that subverts the intended allegory and relates the ‘rise of the new gentility ... from common labourer ... to Whitehall courtier’. The admission that this is a wilful misreading ...”