“... woman called Margherita, who happened to be the wife of a minor Medici. Her aggrieved husband said she ‘was taken against her will by the Count of Mirandola’s men, was put on a horse and carried off’. Pico’s sister claimed that Margherita was in love with him all along and would have followed him anywhere, no force necessary. His nephew and ...”

“... seeing old school friends would make him uneasy, in case they ‘remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded’. Scholarships took him to Cambridge, where he might have been expected to prepare for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones ...”

“... way. Just as he is a mystic literalist, so too he is a natural stylist. He knew this. He wrote to Edward Marsh about his poetry, thus: ‘I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it.’ And yet, he added, ‘it needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of the craftsmen.’ Lawrence’s naturalness as ...”

“... bon viveur, friend of Proust and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Lewis said that in 1968 he ‘engaged the services’ of Marion Mainwaring, a Radcliffe graduate and freelance writer living in Paris, to pursue the ‘Parisian phase’ of Edith Wharton’s life and in particular ‘the matter of Morton Fullerton’. And Lewis ...”

“... in the 1960s was merely the prototype for the full-scale invasion of privacy that, as revealed by Edward Snowden, has since become standard government procedure; Abu Ghraib was merely the tip of the iceberg of ‘enhanced interrogation procedures’ still secretly in use in the endless war on terror. At our current moment, amid pervasive public ignorance ...”

“... funny and deeply serious, and it succeeds in being funny because it is serious. The same can be said of Orlando Furioso as a whole. If you come to the poem from classical epic, or Dante, or later Renaissance epic poets such as Tasso, Spenser or Milton, its playful or satirical aspects stand out. Ariosto’s first readers, though, saw his poem not as an ...”

“... in early childhood and not just with the onset of adolescence, as psychiatric manuals previously said of manic depression. As a result, the prevalence of paediatric bipolar disorder multiplied by a factor of 40 between 1994 and 2002. In August 2002, a cover of Time magazine read: ‘Young and Bipolar – Once called manic depression, the disorder afflicted ...”

“... and architecture’. You could arrange a story in the shape of an hourglass, as Forster said James had done in The Ambassadors, and triumph on your own terms, ‘but at what sacrifice!’ Following ‘the narrow path of aesthetic duty’, he wrote, ‘shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the ...”

“... however improbable, were all she had to hold onto. ‘I wonder where your father is,’ she said one day. With some awkwardness, I reminded her that he’d died four years earlier: ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. I think he’s off with some other woman.’ It was a way of bringing him back to life, and with him her familiar self – even if she could do ...”

“... Diatribes against intermarriage appeared, written by men such as the plantation owner Edward Long. This shouldn’t be taken as clear proof of widespread hostility to interracial couples. Their descendants also intermarried and assimilated; within a few generations, many identified as white. This explains, at least in part, the less visible black ...”

“... metaphysical passage, a long poem every bit as wonderstruck and worshipful as John Dee and Edward Kelley when they scried their obsidian mirror, seeking to speak with angels. It begins, ‘Angels hovering all round,’ and then scatters, across nine pages, verses like fluttering cherubim, invocations to each of them:Heiglot,The angel of ...”

“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... in her hand, big blue eyes and big shiny diamond all sparkling for the camera. The text underneath said: ‘You can’t look at Jane and tell me she’s not worth two months’ salary. I mean just look at her.’ The two months rule is often described as a myth, or sometimes even as a lie, as if the answer to the question of how many days’ pay a ring should ...”

“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”

“... lives and defined personalities in his. At the very outset he demonstrates this skill. There is Edward Parry, son of a cultivated and fashionable doctor in Bath – well-educated, intelligent, pious – a team-player very quick to use his charm and his connections to his own advantage, but also courageous and steadfast. There is John Ross, Parry’s ...”