“... the Year. The kids in his classes affectionately call him Damn-Dam; every year he gets notes from former students thanking him for changing their lives. But ‘an accretion of loneliness’ has brought him to the point of suicide, a need to slip ‘the ties of the world’. The world itself is dismaying: he dreads the outcome of the upcoming 2024 presidential ...”

“... box.’ Meanwhile, two teachers at the local secondary modern are disturbed by the behaviour of a pupil called Susan, and investigate. Susan turns out to be the granddaughter and travelling companion of a strange old man, known only as the Doctor – she was made a relative, it is said, because the writer was uncomfortable with the implications otherwise. The ...”

“... seemed stranded under the looming trees and the charcoal sky, but perhaps I was fixating on its former glories, when it was the subject of a young man’s feverish invention. We walked round the gardens and imagined how Edinburgh might have looked before the New Town was built. In his adult life, Stevenson often lived at the edge of tangled woods, as if ...”

“... more scientifically trained, we should not be very impressed. Nijinska persuades one to take the former view. The quality of Nijinsky’s dancing is not the only controversial thing about him: there is the question of his affair with Diaghilev, and whether Diaghilev was Pygmalion to his Galatea or else Faust to his Gretchen – first corrupting him and then ...”

“... in his mid-teens, Husain had begun attending the East London mosque with Brother Falik, a fellow pupil at Stepney Green. Funded with Saudi money, the mosque was a hotbed of extremism, both political and religious. Its principal ideologue was the founder of Jamat-e-Islami, Abul Ala Mawdudi. Mawdudi taught his followers that the most dangerous enemy to an ...”

“... model of the late Stalin era under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi (‘Stalin’s most faithful pupil’) and for six years lived through the usual show-trials and executions preceded by confessions, and a harsher and more extensive reign of terror than any of the other Soviet satellites had to endure. The chief victim was the home-grown Communist leader ...”

“... Then, with the recklessness of the dying, he divorced his wife and married his mistress, Kate, a former student turned actress, 20 years younger than himself (Inglis reasonably wonders whether all his foreign travel in the late 1930s was driven less by a spirit of adventure and a confidence in the healthy properties of sea air, more by a desire to escape ...”

“... in reality or is merely arbitrary. Within the dialogue the character called Cratylus maintains the former doctrine, one Hermogenes the latter, while Socrates (here as always the philosophic hero) proves elusive. Professor Barton chooses to confine Plato’s problem to proper nouns. In the original dialogue the thought is allowed to overflow from proper nouns ...”

“... of Dos Passos’s USA trilogy (which came out the year before). Woundingly, even Steinbeck’s former high school teacher, Miss Cupp, gave it as her opinion that The Grapes of Wrath was not an ‘authentic’ book. Her old pupil was simply (as he had years ago in the classroom) latching on to other people’s ways of ...”

“... of the early Fathers. Figures such as Cyprian of Carthage and Gregory Thaumaturgus, the latter a pupil of Origen, a graduate of the Beirut law school and then a missionary bishop, give scope to Lane Fox’s descriptive powers and invite the occasional Gibbonian comment, but it is still the exceptional rather than the ordinary that we learn about. In the ...”

“... post by a woman called Taylor Birch, who has revived an accusation of sexual assault against a former high school teacher. Taylor first made her allegation more than a decade earlier, when she was 14, but this time people are listening. The accused is Jacob Strane, a man with whom Vanessa has had a relationship since she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl and he ...”

“... Jean​ Jaurès was a deserving child of the French republican meritocracy. An outstanding pupil from the town of Castres, near Toulouse, he came top in the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure, where he specialised in philosophy. In 1885, at the age of 25, he was elected as a Republican deputy for his home town ...”

“... in your kissThat I have not found yetIn the kisses of womenOr in the honey of their bodies.One former pupil of St Enda’s, the school Pearse set up, said: ‘Pearse used to kiss the young boys. He tried to kiss me but I would not have it.’ ‘Pearse was under a cloud because it was known that he used to kiss boys in his school,’ another ...”

“... Gustav Mahler and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he had been such a prominent opponent of Nazism. After ...”

“... come alive for me.’ This wasn’t the usual story of the worldly sage and his impressionable pupil, however. Friedel was insecure, self-conscious about his stutter and his looks (which were ‘extraterritorial’, according to Adorno), while Teddie, whom the sociologist Leo Löwenthal described as ‘the pampered young gentleman from a well-to-do ...”