“... Hazlitt has a modern feel about him. Among the poets of his age, dying young or turning, like Wordsworth, into pillars of the establishment, he represents a kind of muddling through, an honesty baffled and contingent, inconsistent even; not living in the world of romantic ideals and simplifying gestures but ground in the daily mill of intrigue and accommodation ...”

“... 1974, when IRA bombs were going off all over the place. In the dock was this tiny, strange, silent young woman. The case against her consisted of a string of unequivocal confessions to the bombings at Manchester, Latimer and Euston. None of the confessions was denied – how could they be? Some of the most damning of them had been written in the defendant’s ...”

“... of the night and wake us all up with bottles of wine. I think it was 1931 when Henry met another young expat writer by the name of Alfred Perles. Alfred was mowing the lawn at the American Golf and Country Club, and the expat members were putting out this horrible and pretentious literary magazine called the Booster. So Alfred told the club that he was a ...”

“... Antonine Rome, since the Gonzagas let him make off with a clutch of antique busts that includes a young Marcus Aurelius. The imperial prince is portrayed staring wistfully away from us into the philosophic beyond: an image of governance as a sedative to the governed that saps their contentious energies, leaving them mild and calm. But the grand, dimly lit ...”

“... la France’. Close to it very often stands Joan of Arc, in armour, sword in hand, as if pointing young men to the battlefield, to die for France, or whatever France has fought its wars for. It was tragically appropriate that she was canonised in 1920, just after a million men had died for France; she was wafted up to Heaven on a gale of high explosive and ...”

“... scenes, the poet’s baffled, half-articulate encounter with someone very old or very young, beyond speech, or unready for it, Jonathan Wordsworth emphasises, not that such meetings are occasions for dialogue, but that they are occasions for meditation. He makes the poet-narrator of far more interest to the reader than his interlocutor. Sometimes ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with ...”

“... non-SF novel, The Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in the late 1940s and depicting a young doctor’s wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins ...”

“... a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship but found instead a sketch of a young woman wearing it. She contacts the expedition’s leader and tells him that she is that woman. Today for between $549.99 and $799.99 (on eBay) you can buy a reproduction of the fictional necklace made soon after the film came out; or you can buy a ...”

“... with more acuity than the world-historical events that seem only barely to have affected her. As a young woman, in the early 1930s, she had gone so far as to join the Communist Party, but Beauman is right to make little of this. Really Taylor just admired how the early British Communists seemed to follow ‘the teachings of Christ with the sharing of ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... The miscreant sprinted across the road and turned in at a gate towards the Golf Club. The young cop in pursuit was going well, and the last I saw of the chase was the cop throwing his helmet into the shrubbery the other side of the fence. I hope that, thus disencumbered, he caught his man. There was a don at Corpus Christi, Oxford named Grundy, of ...”

“... art is quite another matter: altogether more ambitious and probing. Out of D.S. Chambers and Michael Baxandall and some Italian scholars Robinson measures up Pound’s ideas about the right relation between artist and patron against what we know of how patronage in fact worked in the ducal fiefs of Renaissance Italy; and when he deals with the closeness ...”

“... in failure. For most of her adult life, she needed the financial support of her brother William Michael. The Brontë sisters also tried to set up a school – a regular ploy among educated women without money or husbands in the mid-Victorian period. They too failed. Then Emily and Anne died. Charlotte didn’t have a well-funded and well-disposed brother to ...”

“... poor but members of the skilled working class. Sailors tended to start their working lives young, even by 18th-century standards, and few of them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and ...”