“... 1943 Klein asked Milner, whose practice she was supervising, to take on her 11-year-old grandson Michael (the boy known as Simon in Milner’s 1952 case study on symbol formation), who was ‘suffering from a loss of talent for schoolwork’. Klein neither recused herself from supervising the analysis, nor held back her disapproval of Milner’s ...”

“... pink flesh, so not as nice. This is our annual holiday, and as usual I set off in the boat with Michael, Niall, Arvin and Shaska to camp on Iniskeel. We land on the little strand, walk round the island, where we startle a big bouncy hare, then we pitch the tent, collect driftwood and cook over the fire. Later, when it’s dark, we toast marshmallows over ...”

“... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...”

“... arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural ...”

“... beef farm in Yorkshire come inside for the winter, and we had recently separated a group of young bullocks from the rest of the herd. The bullocks went into a barn and the others were supposed to stay out for a few more days, but they didn’t like it, and expressed their dislike loudly. We had to move the bullocks’ mothers to a distant field far from ...”

“... Maxwell discusses the implications of his embryonic electrodynamic theory. He writes excitedly to Michael Faraday about his discovery that, according to his own theory, electric and magnetic fields would propagate with a speed that appeared to be identical with the speed of light – from which he concludes, as he states in a subsequent letter to ...”

“... and Paul Muldoon professes to like ‘a great number of poems by a great number of people from Michael Drayton to Craig Raine’. These may seem curious choices as termini of the English tradition, but at the modern end he seems to allude to what has become something of a critical orthodoxy on Raine – that he is the newest and best thing going, modern ...”

“... I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For ...”

“... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his career ...”

“... who says it’s OK to carry on with the experiment. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Michael Collins, who circled the Moon while the first two men walked on it, years later admitted to each other that they privately put the mission’s chance of success (read: survival) at 50-50. That level of risk is no longer acceptable for anything carried on ...”

“... through the engravings of these and other printmakers that European landscapes were known to young British artists. Turner and Constable would have known even the landscapes of their great predecessor Richard Wilson mainly through some wonderful prints by Woollett and others, and at the Academy no fewer than 12 of these are exhibited together, classical ...”

“... book begins: ‘On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, two young people sat down to dinner. Their names were Sophie and Patrick.’ These two, it turns out, are merely the offspring of two of the novel’s main characters, whose stories Sophie proceeds to tell: ‘Come with me, then, Patrick. Let’s go ...”

“... fights unceasing and growing civil disorder. Active involvement in Ireland ceased in 1921 (to the young Monty’s relief: ‘such a war is thoroughly bad for officers and men; it tends to lower their standards of decency and chivalry ...’), but Palestine, ‘the one potentially explosive area which defied all political and military attempts to muddle ...”

“... when she eats it, the flame of love for Ivan flares in her heart. Ugrešić’s Ivan is Mevlo, a young masseur at the beauty farm, he is a Bosnian orphan with a heart of gold, who has suffered from a permanent erection ever since a bomb exploded beside him in Sarajevo. He will find the egg, and there will be a beautiful future for him too ...”

“... likely to put modern readers in mind of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.’ Yes, precisely. From the outset Liszt is characterised as a celeb whose life was bounded by the 19th-century equivalents of the private jet, the billion dollar yacht and the bevy of air-brained blondes. It’s true that there was a ...”