“... iron will was an auxiliary of my most bizarre fantasies,’ he wrote, thinking mostly of money and young women. In 1796, at the age of 21, he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour. A week after arriving at the hulks of Brest, he was heading east, dressed as a sailor, and for the next 13 years he kept on escaping. ‘I escaped from all the galleys of ...”

“... era, has not succeeded. We who are older have now some reason for optimism, for a belief that the young have not had their spirit broken nor their minds unhinged by coming of age in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Susan Faludi discovered her topic, as she tells us in her prefatory Acknowledgments, when she began work on a ‘magazine story on the Harvard-Yale “man ...”

“... American publisher were more than he could refuse. Rider Haggard killed his most popular hero in Allan Quatermain (1887) and was then obliged, by popular request, to bring him back for 14 later episodes. Presumably, when Bram Stoker decapitated Dracula at the end of his 1897 novel, he fondly expected that to be the end of it. But the dead ghoul became the ...”

“... has stuck firmly in the work of popular novelists from Rosemary Sutcliff to Bernard Cornwell and Allan Massie, and (in this case with strident claims to historical accuracy) in movies like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004). Fleming ignores the phenomenon, and the scenario. It isn’t the only piece of historical tradition she rejects. Right at the start ...”

“... and ‘iconic’ this and ‘optics’ that, had they but known it. All the doomed poets, dying young, or youngish: Rimbaud at 37, Poe at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and ...”

“... communities by international capital. In Bill Forsyth’s comic-utopian Local Hero (1983), the young executive sent to Scotland to buy a fishing village on behalf of Knox Oil and Gas has no other means of communicating with his boss in Houston, Texas, than from a public phone box on the quayside across the road from the hotel. The locals have a whip-round ...”

“... important to him. And then there was Wagner, whose influence threatened to overwhelm him. As a young man, he found ways to dismiss the Ring, but Tristan and Parsifal exerted a force that could not be ignored and he had no choice but to make terms with them. The story of that accommodation was the story of his career as a composer, as Robin Holloway ...”

“... a home of sorts in Dry Drayton, a fenland village north-west of Cambridge. His host was Canon Allan Armstrong, a Church of Ireland priest and a socialist who had been driven overseas by the IRA and kept an open house in the rambling Georgian rectory – ‘shabby, genteel and sublime’, as Neat describes it. Henderson was among those who moved into its ...”

“... is there simply to attract a reproductive mate. Carden, however, will not reproduce. As a young girl she was lied to and told that she had twisted ovaries at birth; she was wretched at puberty until discovering the truth about her syndrome freed her into the complexity of her history. Now she revels in her ability to appeal to and enact both sides of ...”

“... that the lines were intended for an unfinished play or written as a lyric to Fanny Brawne, the young woman who did not take Keats’s hand in marriage because of his dismal prospects. Yet even if the fragment has Fanny in view as ‘thou’, ‘thine heart’ and so on, we cannot escape its address. When Keats writes ‘– see, here it is/I hold it ...”

“... a passionate interior life – all that noise coming in. You have to make music of it somehow.’ Allan Gurganus, who studied with her as a young man, has described how, in her classes, everyone was encouraged to talk at once, with Paley acting as conductor – he remembered it as ‘stereophonic sound’. From ...”

“... You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the house and its occupiers are at war, and the drama lies in the question of who will come out on top. With Herrera, by contrast, there is never any doubt.In distrusting character, or finding it passé, the ...”

“... the corner of Howe Street and Heriot Row, where you are bound to feel the press of Stevenson’s young mind, for these are his ‘sleepy quarters’, his world of oil-lamps and dark coasts.He lived at 17 Heriot Row, five floors of grey Georgian elegance facing the Queen Street Gardens, the dell of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson would dedicate that ...”

“... latter mood, he would become condescending and puckish, and would draw contrasts between bumptious young America and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a ...”

“... and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch.’ He thought about having sex in the shower with the young man; he contemplated ‘the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation’. But then he realised that he was, in fact, a respectable married man with three children who dreamed of having his face on a stamp. ‘But then there are the spiritual facts: my ...”