“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... important to him. And then there was Wagner, whose influence threatened to overwhelm him. As a young man, he found ways to dismiss the Ring, but Tristan and Parsifal exerted a force that could not be ignored and he had no choice but to make terms with them. The story of that accommodation was the story of his career as a composer, as Robin Holloway ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was very private that a man dare do it.’ He had one great familial connection: a distant cousin, Edward Montagu, had risen through the ranks of the Parliamentary army and then become joint general at sea. After Cromwell’s death, Montagu switched sides, and – though Pepys didn’t know it – opened a secret line to the royal court in exile. Pepys would ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... which have no apparent mechanisms for play, past or present, can be played with (as Cornell’s young neighbour showed), or look like they have been played with. However arduous he found the process of putting the right pieces together – there is evidence in his diaries that he was often tormented by the exercise – the boxes in their final state always ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”