“... letter in which he reports that symmetry has demanded 22. Though several letters imply that as a young man he had no trouble adhering to space restrictions, by the 1890s, at least, the pattern seems fixed. Yet the impression of haplessness James liked to convey as words ran away with him can be terribly deceptive, if only because he never lost the ...”

“... had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in ...”

“... Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in 1934. A young woman called Bonnie Parker was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed ...”

“... The prelude to their friendship, as Edith Wharton tells it in the autobiography, had her as a shy young suitor for the great man’s attention at dinners, hoping her ‘newest Doucet dress’ or ‘beautiful new hat’ would win his interest. But it was mainly her literary friendship with Paul Bourget, and her beginnings as an author, with The Greater ...”

“... was a sleepy, gentlemanly don who suddenly turned up trumps in the anti-Nazi struggle, like a Percy Blakeney, an Albert Campion or a Peter Wimsey. (It happens that the hero was played by a schoolfellow of Wodehouse’s, the Hungarian Leslie Howard: he is mentioned in Wodehouse on Wodehouse.) The British public wanted Bertie Wooster or P.G. Wodehouse to ...”

“... of scenery.’ Only a few months earlier, he had received an unsettling visit in Keswick from a young poet and disciple, Percy Shelley. The Revolt of Islam would draw on Southey’s Oriental experiments, and right down to Demogorgon’s song in Prometheus Unbound, cadences from his poems and Coleridge’s of the 1790s ...”

“... a story Barthelme described as a ‘response’ to the Vietnam War, a wise woman observes that ‘young people … run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society.’ The narrator visits her for advice after trying to ‘defend the city’ from invaders by constructing a barricade out of frying pans, wine bottles, ‘a ...”

“... by Holbein with her old-fashioned head-dress and pursed little lips, becomes here ‘a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise’. Mantel’s pictorialism can become almost imagist, in the Ezra Pound sense, when she is describing Jane. So when she first touches ...”

“... terms. After the death of his friend Hendrik Andersen’s brother in 1902, James wrote to the young sculptor: ‘The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close & long, or do anything to make you rest on me, & feel my deep participation – this torments me, dearest boy, & makes me ache for you, & for myself.’ There ...”

“... it more prosaically as ‘a black matter burnt and congealed in a round glass’. Like Lord Percy in Blackadder, whose alchemical pursuits engender not gold but a nugget of purest ‘green’, Morton had made some ‘black’.Successful alchemists tend to be fictional. Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist (1988) is a meditation on following your ...”

“... from attacks by them.What made the story of particular, if shaming, fascination to an ambitious young Sunday Pictorial reporter called Harry Procter was that Procter himself had interviewed Christie three years earlier, when the bodies of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine, who lived in the upstairs flat, had been found in the wash-house in the ...”

“... it will be born dead.”’Comyns was writing with hindsight about herself as a naive young woman who knew nothing about birth control. ‘I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said “I won’t have any babies” very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control.’ But Sophia soon ...”

“... had sequestered him. But the rebels’ hope lay in the 14-year-old king himself, still too young to be blamed for the misrule and corruption that surrounded him. Richard met with Tyler and his supporters at Smithfield and conceded to all their demands, following a risky plan hatched by his defenders. His ‘fair words’ counted for nothing: the ...”

“... Origo offers this sage advice to those embarking on a career in the life-writing trade: The young biographer who has upon his desk his first intriguing pile of papers, will do well to arm himself with humility, and let them speak for themselves. Later on the time will come to sift, to compare, and to bring to life again; but first he should listen ...”