“... we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his pitiably meagre possessions; in the process ...”

“... on will-power. She had been reluctant to marry her husband, the statesman better known as Lord John Russell (or ‘Finality Jack’) than as the First Earl Russell, for he was 48 to her 25 when they married in 1841, and nobody supposed she ever loved the man to whom she dutifully bore four children. She did her duty – in Griffin’s nice phrase, ‘She ...”

“... a bit of a lightweight, a ‘natural number two’ who should never have become prime minister. John Grigg wrote of him before the Suez crisis: ‘Popularity means much more to him than it ever should mean to a statesman. Since the early days, when he was idolised by millions on account of his personal appearance and blameless views, he has never lost the ...”

“... in character. ‘After retiring from UCT and settling in Adelaide,’ Kannemeyer writes, ‘John Coetzee became a far more relaxed person.’ One symptom of this relative relaxation is the emergence, or re-emergence, since 2002, of a playful, inscrutably teasing side to his writing. In the essays collected in Inner Workings (2007) a dry sense of humour ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... and Strittmatter tell the story of how China arrived at this point, and what happened next. China took to the internet relatively late and relatively slowly: in 1994 there were only about 1500 internet users in China, most of them academics, with, according to Griffiths, ‘the entire country sharing the equivalent of what was a home connection in the ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... to his studio and gave him an easel, large sheets of paper and materials to work with. Beegan took to filling the paper with drawings of men and animals, and writing out abstruse, disconnected thoughts, or maybe messages. ‘This man lived in a world of his own. He did many similar drawings, covered with esoteric writing which obviously had a private ...”

“... had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor ...”

“... monuments salvaged by Alexandre Lenoir together with treasures confiscated by the state. It took Lenoir several years to convert this repository into one of the most influential displays ever devised in a museum: the religious and royalist past that the revolution had endeavoured to destroy was given chronological order, an evocative setting and a ...”

“... the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series of Guardian columns in praise of Herbert by an Anglican minister called Miranda Threlfall-Holmes credits his poems with leading her from teenage atheism towards Christianity. ‘They left me with the sense that I was ...”

“... sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by ...”

“... is another generally acknowledged genius of the game world. His first great creation, The Sims, took the ideas of Abraham Maslow about mankind’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ (food, shelter, security and so on, up to ‘peak experiences’) and applied them to a game in which users could set the rules for their various characters, and then allow them to go off ...”

“... through a population is more rapid. The fatal flu of 1918 came and went in a couple of years; it took only weeks to dispatch its victims. They had little time to reflect on their condition. The high-risk groups were the same as with most diseases – children and the old, the least articulate – rather than those in the prime of life (though Aids, of ...”