“... confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an … (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts both marital crisis and a frantic burst of ...”

“... things. What is certain is that his visual acumen was already present, and was cultivated from a young age.Evans was around 12 when the family moved to Toledo, Ohio – his father had been hired by Willys-Overland, an automobile company – and he took it badly. Making the transition from imitation English pastoral life to the unsavoury realities of a tough ...”

“... in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the Second World War, rather than ...”

“... dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The ...”

“... of writing the history of a war from the point of view of the veterans. Niellands lionises the young fliers, and sturdily sets aside complicating considerations such as international law – reminding us instead that ‘there was a war on.’ He does everything he can to minimise the difference – which Lindqvist on the contrary stresses – between ...”

“... in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and ...”

“... sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the cricket, although he was not much good at games, being tiny, near blind behind his pebble glasses and afflicted with ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...”

“... Oxbridge meritocracy recruited through provincial grammar schools. When Denis Healey encountered Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins at Balliol just before the Second World War, such was their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed Jenkins ...”

“... and energy. With such training one would not only be confident and invincible, one would remain young for ever, just as Chanel herself seemed to do, and as her clothes allowed any woman to do. Simple garments in clear shapes and subdued colours are very becoming to lined faces and ageing figures, as the masculine scheme for clothes attests. Chanel’s use ...”

“... in addition campaigned for the revived Malthusian League. At the same time, under the influence of Edward Aveling, she became excited by a romantically-tinged version of Darwinism and was among the first women to embark on a science degree at University College London. She lived round the corner from Bradlaugh, and his daughters became fellow students. But ...”

“... Radnor Parliamentarian – and Eva Figes’s source of inspiration for this volume – to her son Edward: ‘I have sent your tutor a box of dried plums, the box is directed to you; tell him it is a Lenten token.’ From Elizabeth Mackenzie, nursing in the Crimea, in 1855, to her aunt: ‘Your box has at length arrived safely and its contents are most useful ...”

“... goes mad, Rimbaud abandons writing, Lautréamont dies abnormally young): i.e. the poet’s destiny is to risk madness despair and death for the sake of a possibility of a redeeming existence by means of the secret power of the Word. In a footnote to this apotheosis of the poet as doomed super-rationalist, avatar of the ...”

“... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...”