“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a ...”

“... in his 1901 authorised biography, a school of 20th-century muckrakers has made much of the young man’s alleged roistering in the hell-holes of night-time Leith. While writing his book, Bell reports that he was ‘asked more than once if it was true that Stevenson was a pederast’. Another set of legends gives credence to a super-virile RLS, who left ...”

“... reduced to a Parliamentary group of only four MPs (including two of his children), that the young Selwyn Lloyd drifted towards the Conservatives. Indeed he might even have been tempted to join the ‘family party’ itself since his name had often been linked with that of Megan Lloyd George. At Cambridge in the Twenties, it was Lloyd’s Liberal ...”

“... which are [his emphasis] at the forefront of culture, those which excite the imagination of the young ... ’; and they are identified as art and utopian politics. This identification itself seems at this present moment rather strange, but even apart from that, it is clear that whether or not the sciences do or do not excite the ...”

“... shocking impact. We do indeed start with an intent adolescent watcher of a Mafia hangout, a young Irish-Italian named Henry Hill, and his fascination does lead him to a compromising involvement in illegality and a witnessing of horrific violence. He undergoes something of an ordeal and he too ends by extricating himself from the guilt of his actions and ...”

“... India, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere’. As a young woman she worked to relieve the potato famine of 1898, and later spent most of her fairly ample fortune in attempts to alleviate the routine cruelties of British rule. Francis Stuart, who at 17 married Maud’s daughter Iseult and was himself a fair hater ...”

“... a Japanese. Akira Suzuki (‘Brrm! Brrm!’ to his yobbish British acquaintances) is a promising young Japanese executive on a career fast track. He is slim, beautiful, a poet and a superb athlete. The antipodes, one might say, of a certain Australian. The young man has come west as to a finishing school. In London, by a ...”

“... As a young man working for Lord Beaver-brook’s broadsheet Daily Express, I used to have a highly pleasurable daydream in which the coincidence of my name being the same as my employer’s led to some confusion among the company lawyers, with the result that I became the proprietor on the Old Man’s death. I would visualise myself getting off the bus outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin ...”