“... the unassuming disclaimer that he ‘is not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan’. Edward Said would have explained it as a consequence of imperial power: British travellers and writers have been drawn to South and West Asia for the same reasons French ones ventured to North Africa and the Levant. To an extent, this is surely correct: imperial ...”

“... a Monk that was believed to be by him was acquired for the Louvre. Numerous artists, including the young Manet, registered requests to copy it. Then, in the following year, the same museum bought the Réunion de portraits, a much acclaimed acquisition, of which Manet made a copy, probably later in the decade (both original and copy are in the exhibition). It ...”

“... and almost thirty thousand men sailed for the West Indies under the newly promoted Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, hero of the recent taking of Porto Bello in Panama, to capture other key Spanish possessions in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret ...”

“... if he does not take Communion when they go, she will suspect that he has been having sex with a young widow. Although he tries the confessional beforehand, he cannot receive absolution because he refuses to obey Father Rank’s instruction to steer clear of Helen Rolt. If he takes Communion in his state of mortal sin, then he will damn himself, but he goes ...”

“... the World Cup Final to take to the streets. The old Arab order was buried in Tahrir Square. Young revolutionaries rose up against a regime which for three decades had stood in the way of Palestinian aspirations. It seemed too good to be true and some pundits in Palestine wondered whether it wasn’t an American conspiracy. But it wasn’t, and ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... a lot of whisky’ before he found God. If Kavanaugh had simply said, as Bush did, ‘when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible,’ his confirmation would have been assured.)*President Trump claims that ‘China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November ...”

“... shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But O’Neill followed up. He replied to the Democratic influencer Harry Sissons: ‘I’m telling you exactly what Betas like you will be used for: food and sex.’ Fucking and devouring, or ...”

“... their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing hothead, insisting always upon relevance and social engagement, would object to being compared with Holmes. As Lewis Thomas is none of these things, he will not mind it being said that his opening paragraph is very much in Holmes’s style: ‘I ...”

“... interests of free speech his critics should stop trying to sniff out moral wrongdoing. But when Edward Moxon pulled the book, Swinburne stood firm. ‘To alter my course or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except ...”

“... myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the strength ...”

“... Impact on his Contemporaries, Ernst Honigmann took a hint from the socialist playwright Edward Bond, whose Bingo portrayed Shakespeare as guiltily complicit in contemporary social conflicts rather than serenely transcending them. Honigmann agreed that the biographical evidence supported a view of Shakespeare closer to Bond’s than to the bland ...”

“... It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his love of words. If he found words fascinating – their sounds, their peculiar symmetries and associations, their chimes, rhymes, assonances and quiddities – then he was likely to prove the real thing ...”

“... Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did little, however, to appease his critics. One journalist thought that the six runners should attempt a form of ...”

“... a stick. That photo also suggests, obscurely, a certain mismatch between the intense, challenging young man who confronts the camera with a stare falling somewhere between steely and sultry, and the professional role he was coming to occupy. For, to all intents and purposes, he was an orthodox product of Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’ in its ...”