“... and his ‘fidgety ghost’ – the phrase comes from one of his Pericles-inspired poems, ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ – still haunts Australian poetry. One pictures the poet lugging a battered second-hand typewriter from flea-pit hotels to temporary lodgings, watching through sleepless mosquito-plagued nights (‘Now/Have I found you, my ...”

“... became a highly-paid lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly ...”

“... novels, far fewer imagine themselves as middle-aged. In Britain between the wars a respectable young lady, dependent on her father for an allowance, had limited options. She expected and was expected to marry. A graduate might find professional employment, but the marriage bar stymied careers in many areas, including teaching and the civil ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... the first African-American nominee, but rather to deride, with soporific sarcasm, Obama the young whippersnapper and his belief in ‘change’. A bizarre line from McCain’s speech has already become a six-second YouTube classic: ‘We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies.’ Watching Obama speak, I found it hard to believe ...”

“... is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed ...”

“... their context has altered: they emerge against the grain of the argument, not as part of it. Exit Young Tucker, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota; enter Tucker Senior, full Professor at the University of Virginia. And Tucker is robed in professorial garb from head to footnotes. Part One of his book, which covers Tennyson’s career up to the ...”

“... chemistry student. Knowing nothing about him, I expected to see a portly professor: in came a slim young man who looked like one of us students and was quite without pomp. We were enormously impressed. I next encountered him in Cambridge in 1947, when he told my wife and me that he had never wanted to build an atomic bomb for Hitler. Fortunately, he did not ...”

“... In a letter to Robert Liddell dated 12 January 1940, Barbara Pym speaks well of her progress on a new novel, Crampton Hodnet, which she finished later that year, but which has only now surfaced for publication: ‘It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did. Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end ...”

“... of the defiant speeches made in defence of the Spanish Republic and the Popular Front. And, as a young politician in prewar Chile, Allende had arranged to give refuge to many anti-Franco Spaniards and Catalans and Basques. Moreover, he had sent a delegation to the Bolivian frontier in late 1968, to rescue the cadaverous survivors of Che Guevara’s doomed ...”

“... be the Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its ...”

“... of old women carry particular conviction: Inside every grandmother there sits an attractive young girl mouthing pieties, complaining of sore lips or God knows what. They prophesy the past with unerring accuracy; history for them is painful gossip, halfway between myth and memory A fine sequence entitled ‘Metro’ carries as an epigraph a line from ...”

“... as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: ...”