“... taken art on as a sideline. Even the rival giants of American art criticism when Fried was a young man, Harold Rosenberg and Fried’s own mentor Clement Greenberg, started out wanting to be all-round literati before becoming specialists in the fine arts; but Fried, who was one of the first wave of art critics to have a PhD in art history, seems to have ...”

“... of the prospects and the profit of doing it. One of Baldwin’s earliest biographers, G.M. Young, is told off (nearly all previous writers on Baldwin are told off for talking nonsense of one kind or another) for initiating a strand of interpretation ‘where psychological or temperamental supposition replaces adequate historical ...”

“... most of his close friends (he was very well connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited ...”

“... what it means to know it well; those who, in their day, did know it well were ready to appoint a young man with a record of academic failure to the most influential Latin chair outside Oxford and Cambridge. He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal ...”

“... a Somerset gentry family which had served in India since Henry Strachey went out as secretary to Robert Clive. Jane was clever, as patchily educated as most women of her class and generation, but determined to learn and with ‘a vein in her’, as Lytton later recalled, ‘of oddity and caprice’. Richard, anti-social, a hypochondriac and old enough to be ...”

“... pastoral ‘Rills’) which not only Pope in Peri Bathous but also Hill himself, annotating Edward Young’s Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1719), identified as the stylistic traps lying in wait for prospective exponents of the sublime. Neither The Creation nor The Judgment Day (or, for that matter, any other poem by Hill) features in the excellent anthology ...”

“... that she must be its real author, and that if she wasn’t then she’d finally met her match. Robert Elsmere (1888) set Mrs Humphry Ward on Eliot’s vacant throne, and ten years later The Sorrows of Satan (1895) established Marie Corelli as heir apparent. Trollope would have been provoked by Woolf’s celebrated requirement for women writers. A room of ...”

“... a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause’. In February 1918, when the vote was finally granted to property-owning women over the age of thirty, she was in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons ...”

“... At home in Cambridge, Tunde decides to shower with a bar of black soap. He remembers how, as a young, guilt-stricken Christian, he rejected local traditions: his parents spoke of the spiritual benefits of bathing with black soap, but he preferred Joy or Imperial Leather. ‘He was a city kid and anything that didn’t come in a printed package, anything ...”

“... to pop up every few pages in this biography; it must have felt like a second home to him. As a young man he was gone for years at a time, to Europe in the late 1910s, to the US a decade later. He starved and bludged his way around Icelandic diasporas on two continents: the Icelandic wife of a millionaire in Brighton, the community of so-called ‘Western ...”

“... Confederate soldiers in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government ...”

“... could be seen from a single, central vantage point. In cell after cell where, most recently, young offenders had been held, there was a set of metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small ...”

“... to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was 53 at the time. When Kautsky visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been evident in her eyes (younger than the rest of her, Luxemburg insists, by 20 ...”

“... giorno natale.’ Hardly a joke, in the circumstances it merits a smile, but from this mirthless young man nothing is forthcoming. I lay my head down again. At least I seem to have stopped bleeding. Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on 9 May and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I ...”

“... address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early ...”