“... me’, is misleading. It is true that in this vein we are given a few tantalising glimpses of the young Scruton, cycling off to visit old churches or being treated with generosity (and whisky) by a sympathetic teacher. The book as a whole, however, is insistently ideological rather than autobiographical: we are time and again told not so much how certain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no English-speaking Jesuits. He suggested, instead, that Pole should send two or three hand-picked young men to study with the Jesuits in Rome, either in the Germanicum, the training college for priests for Germany, or else in the international Collegio Romanum. Once imbued with a proper Roman spirit, they could return, several years down the line, to assist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the far more mild cowpox but rarely suffered smallpox. The Gloucestershire physician Edward Jenner knew this too, and the beginning of the end of smallpox came in 1796 when he inoculated an eight-year-old boy with pus from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid. Over the following months, Jenner repeatedly exposed the boy to smallpox ...”

“... we might connect his prodigious if uneven writing with his dizzying array of concerns.Like many a young writer, Morris already had an income. When he came of age in 1855, he began drawing an annuity of £900. His father, a bill broker turned gentleman who bought his own coat of arms, had died in 1847, leaving the family his mining investments. Although Hanson ...”

“... remain his academic home until his retirement, as its master, forty years later.Like many serious young people in the 1930s, Hill was appalled at what he saw as the failure of capitalism and the lurch towards fascism, finding in Marxism both a persuasive analysis of what was happening and a source of hope for a better world. In 1935 he spent six months in ...”

“... his mother’s bed. Pico was a child prodigy in Latin and Greek, with a miraculous memory. As a young teen he went to Bologna to study canon law, and then roved the university towns of Italy and France seeking ever more esoteric knowledge. In Padua, he learned Hebrew and the philosophy of Averroes from the Jewish scholar Elia del Medigo. In Rome, he studied ...”

“... goes wildly over the top. The smirking crew around Redwood are deeply depressing, Tony Marlow and Edward Leigh both fat and complacent and looking like two cheeks of the same arse. It’s all so sixth-form, the prefects in revolt. 14 July. Letter this morning saying the Tokyo production of Wind in the Willows is to be revived for two weeks in August, the ...”

“... Momigliano’s ‘Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method’, and Giuseppe Giarrizzo’s Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del Settecento, the historian of the Roman Empire has himself become the object of serious historical study. It can still be maintained that his work is, in D.R. Woolf’s words, ‘probably the most famous and perhaps the most ...”

“... living with his wife and beloved dogs in Claremont, California, where he worked – the first Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing – at Pomona College. Before that, he’d worked at Illinois State University, living with two other dogs in Bloomington, which is where he was when Infinite Jest was published and when David Lipsky conducted a ...”

“... unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady … Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that? Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real ...”

“... Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War. ‘For reasons that we still cannot know for certain,’ Edward Said would lament, ‘Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming antisemitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the ...”