“... had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent self-pity as the portal to true empathy with others.But he was alert to his lack of parents. Substitutes and metaphors ...”

“... to hurry up, finish their studies and take ship to Vietnam.It’s often been said since that these young men would not have been bothered by the war if it were not for their own impending draft notices, and that they were quite prepared to let the underclass be conscripted in their stead. This is quite simply a slander. The arguments and conversations of those ...”

“... cars. A few landlords are turning their empty palaces into hotels, restaurants and bars where the young stay late into the night in jasmine-scented courtyards to savour water pipes as their ancestors did in Ottoman times. Many young people in Damascus look and act like Americans, sitting in cafés, holding hands when they ...”

“... Esmond splashed out on the celebrated Peal’s bespoke brogues for his newly arrived young Italian wife; she was to have the best of English classic design, sturdier by far than a glass slipper, but as clear an expression of his hopes for his bride and his own status. Ilia realised the seriousness of the gift as the Peal family fitter, wearing a ...”

“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... part of a verse of the Old Hundredth (the name Waugh gave to one of his fictional night-clubs). Edward FitzGerald chose that verse for his tombstone, well-remembering the 12th-century verse he had translated from the Persian: ‘We are helpless: thou hast made us what we are.’ Henry VI wrote a prayer: Domine Jesu, qui me creasti, redimsti et preordinaste ...”

“... paradise that he invented from scratch. Palmer had been born, in 1805, in leafy Walworth, but when young had moved with his family to Houndsditch, where his father had set up as a bookseller. Houndsditch was dirty and rough; the contrast with Walworth must have been dismaying, and the boy’s unhappiness was subsequently deepened by the death of his mother and ...”

“... work from the start, when she mentions in her prologue the poem ‘The Voice’, which recalls the young writer meeting Emma Gifford, his wife-to-be, at a station in Cornwall. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue ...”

“... The Hundred Years War served to strengthen, not weaken, the links across the Channel. First Edward III, then Henry V, attempted to establish an English empire to cover much the same area as the Angevin had done, or indeed, with the conquest of Paris, to swallow up the political heart of the realm of France as well. The influx of French hostages after ...”

“... contains some of the words he liked to recycle. He would use the same ones in poem after poem: ‘young’, ‘sudden’, ‘keen’, ‘delicious’, ‘kiss’, ‘thrilling’, ‘sweet’, ‘stars’. The word ‘flowers’ turns up nearly fifty times in his first collection, Tulips & Chimneys, published in 1923. Some of his sonnets − this is one of ...”

“... Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 hours after his statue fell than in the 125 years it stood in Bristol city centre. In south Mumbai, the ...”

“... his columns even make it to the mainland, though most of his readership is outside China. He looks young enough at 36 to be asked for ID when buying alcohol, but in the course of the book his name is suggested for a list of the hundred top Chinese public intellectuals published by a news website with the classically euphemistic name Harmonious Times. He is in ...”

“... licking oatmeal dust from the floor or seen the thatch begin to burn above their heads while the young men were still overseas with the Duchess’s regiment. But it is a strength and a tonic when a person of talent from another culture sets down the unveiled facts. People in the Highlands now say, ‘This is all new – we never had anything like this ...”

“... The Old James, in order to feel at one with himself, had to believe, at some level, that Young James had merely slipped in technique but had really meant what the Old James meant. Horne does not pay much attention to works outside James’s own oeuvre as they might have had an influence on this undertaking, and on James’s writing: there is a ...”

“... comedy of ‘The Secret Sharer’. Conrad, who used on occasion to vie with his friend and agent Edward Garnett in yarn-spinning, told him that his tale ‘between you and me, is it ... every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck.’ The sense of fitness was what most impressed D.H. Lawrence, who observed of one of the ...”