“... I had a machine gun, I would shoot you all.’ She would have been serious about that, too. For young women navigating the music scene, Nico stood as encouragement to hold your ground and stay in the room, to become more yourself. She was also evidence of what it might cost.She turned up to perform in Manchester in 1981 and stayed there for the next seven ...”

“... fields. Most of these responses have developed or refined Said’s framework in some way. Not so Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Irwin’s central point is that before there was Orientalism, there was Orientalism: the scholarly study of languages and texts pertaining to the Orient. The book operates on two levels. In ...”

“... used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the ...”

“... told another friend. He wasn’t to be taken as seriously as a distinguished foreigner like Ernst Robert Curtius might think; and Eliot wrote to someone else that he had ‘never found any writer whose views were so antipathetic to me as Murry’s’. Murry seems not to have understood that his polemical position meant they couldn’t have lunch, and must ...”

“... where Ivanov extolled the superiority of British beer over ice-cold lager. ‘He was a pleasant young man of about my own age.’ This was all James could tell me. Three years after his death in February 2000, and after several fruitless inquiries to MI5 and MI6 to find out the nature of his official duties, my brother and sister and I (thanks to the ...”

“... first professor in the country to lecture on the steam-engine, but also that he eloped with the young wife of a Captain Heaviside and cowered under a piano in a Paris hotel while Heaviside tried to thrash him with a cane. Ashton’s discussion of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge – founded in the same year as the university and by the same ...”

“... by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that ...”

“... are things we know innately, though the knowledge may be tacit or unconscious. He was struck by young children’s capacity to form and understand phrases and sentences without being taught. ‘The poverty of the stimulus’ they received – the brevity of their contacts with the world – suggested the inadequacy of behaviourist explanations for language ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young cows); statue, trolley and rails are in turn mounted on a platform bearing the inscription DUAL, followed by a bracket and two forms of an ancient Greek verb. When a carefully trained magpie activates an internal spring with its beak, the platform slowly ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... warm yet terrifying, the sound of childbirth, I always think, as heard by the baby. When I was young, though – I dimly remember – the Cybermen did seem quite scary, with their blank, square faces and cruel, insatiable appetites for human whatever-it-was. But actually, most of that mystery came not from their appearance, but from their name. Back ...”

“... repeatedly in this biography, so much so that often they swap emotional valences. Here is the young writer and insurance worker reliably showing up to work every morning at 8.15; here he is getting on his best friend Brod’s nerves over whether or not to keep the window open when they share a room at a hotel (Kafka prevails); here he is at a nudist ...”

“... the editor of the Dutch-language version of Tintin magazine who coined its famous slogan, ‘for young people from 7 to 77’. There were other divides he couldn’t cross. From the age of 13, when he was moved from a secular to a religious school at the insistence of his father’s employer, he was closely tied to the institutions and networks of the ...”

“... people who will show you a new image, downloaded and printed from the Internet. It is an image of Robert Thompson as he may look now. Vengeance is evergreen, and the regulars know the image by heart and they watch the door.I don’t mean to marshal these thoughts, as Johnson said, into a school and call it an academy, but I believe people in Britain ...”