“... glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in at the public theatres; Lyly the author of ...”

“... of a collection of savants he had brought to Egypt, that he would far rather be a Newton than an Alexander. To which Monge replied that no one could attain again to the glory of Newton for there was only one world to discover. Not so, said Napoleon: there is still the ‘world of details’ and the laws that govern them – a sentiment curiously apposite to ...”

“... century. The mad annotator who obfuscates a text by elucidating it witters away in the margins of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. The fictional pedantic scholar-annotator Martinus Scriblerus, for whom mad theories and painful overstatements of the obvious were more or less indistinguishable, was at once a representation of everything that Pope and his friends ...”

“... about Rudolf’s character (‘a kind, honest and loving son’), as had his ballet master, Alexander Pushkin, and Pushkin’s wife, Xenia: Rudik’s act of treachery had not been premeditated; he never talked politics and was not a dissident of any kind. A character report noted, moreover, that there had been no signs of immoral behaviour before his ...”

“... impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son – Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International. Her book moves from the site of her father’s first oilfield to the site of her reforming achievements at Marks and Spencer. ‘What were my qualifications?’ she asks in her foreword. ‘A Russian soul, a ...”

“... those supercooled, Stygian tempi. By explaining the earlier development of Klemperer’s art, Peter Heyworth’s biography places the notorious aspects of its last phase in a proper perspective, and restores balance to a reputation which has become, in England at any rate, lopsided. It teaches us, for example, that Klemperer’s tempi were not always ...”

“... was still keen to explore the options but the rest of them just didn’t seem that interested. Peter Mandelson was detached (‘Surely the rich have suffered enough,’ he says at one point, when Laws tries to find some common ground on progressive taxation), Harriet Harman was distracted, Ed Balls was truculent. Worst of all was Ed Miliband, portrayed ...”

“... just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race Relations ...”

“... do with what I am?’What he did immediately after Cambridge was become, along with his brother Alexander, an internationally famous folk singer. Having grown up listening to their older brother’s blues records, the McEwens made a pilgrimage to the US, visiting Lead Belly’s widow to see his 12-string guitar and finding themselves, with a characteristic ...”

“... includes open spaces, small spaces, avocados, tall escalators, flying, social kissing and the Blue Peter theme music. But reviewing Christopher’s List of Behavioural Problems, I decided he’d probably be even worse to live with than I am (Christopher, among other things, likes not to talk to people for a long time, not to eat or drink anything for a long ...”

“... Confucianism was ‘transformed into a state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the cost of their intellectual ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... Dark, Carcanet, 1993), Brigitte Timmermann’s The Third Man’s Vienna (Shippen Rock, 2005), and Alexander Glück’s On the Trail of The Third Man in Vienna (Styria, 2014), replete with fine photographs. The Third Man Museum in Vienna opened in 2005, and houses, among many other things, relevant film scripts, photographs, posters, 420 cover versions of ...”

“... access to the alien spirit of British Protestantism through working for his uncle, the businessman Alexander Scott. For these eclectic experiences to leave their mark on his work, mere exposure was not enough; I suspect the reason Leskov still haunts the purgatory of reputations is that he sacrificed a portion of his ego on the altar of doubt. While Tolstoy ...”

“... sea to help Odysseus, a ‘woman who flies’? What about the Wilis in Giselle or Tinkerbell in Peter Pan? The status of ‘women’ for these ethereal beings feels a bit of a stretch: their ease of flight marks them out as not suffering the same physical limitations as humans. Young sees flight as a fantasy of female liberation: ‘Women who fly want to be ...”