“... more perilous, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her manuscript, not yet entitled Hope against Hope, I had read at her kitchen table and then, with her blessing, sent to the West. It was not a time for too many memoirs. Lourié was my entrée to Akhmatova. Some year or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail ...”

“... love, my mother, my mother.’ A few days after her mother’s death, panic-stricken, unable to read, roaming the house, she says that the journal she is writing is an ‘attempt to salvage part of our lives, to understand, but first to salvage’. Alzheimer’s is a disease that seems to be about forgetting, but is actually about remembering: what is ...”

“... a few lines on one side of it; Moore’s vast archive of unpublished poetry was drawn on by Peter Riley for two posthumous collections, Lacrimae Rerum (1988) and Longings of the Acrobats (1990), but for the most part sleeps undisturbed in the Cambridge University Library. Moore’s few, but fervent, admirers are hoping that a fresh Selected to be ...”

“... the world. Autism was seen as outside the realm of regular human functioning. When Oliver Sacks read Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he thought Grandin’s co-author, Margaret Scariano, must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and ...”

“... could not avoid a damage assessment on Philby. His 30-page report, according to CIA officers who read it, was poorly constructed and very uninformative – ‘an attempt to turn the spotlight away from Philby’. Yet to himself he was forced to admit that everything Philby had learnt about the CIA had come from the very officer whose job it was to protect ...”

“... never can taste the joy of Elysium, because it is a spiritual joy & they cannot perceive it. When Peter Gay wrote about the sensual life of the Victorians, he cited the Hawthornes as an exemplary pair, remarking how their talk of ‘holy’ kisses sanctified their evident delight in the satisfactions of the flesh. But Herbert is more inclined to emphasise the ...”

“... of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every historian operates with a theory of human nature, every historian is inescapably an amateur psychologist. The choice is not whether to use psychology or not, but whether to borrow the insights of professional ...”

“... of magic, and partly to the historical researches of scholars like Frances Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ...”

“... figures. He notes that people who have never visited museums feel that there are too many words to read. One is surprised that they were permitted (or could be bothered) to fill in this part of a questionnaire, but their response does at least suggest that some of the less educated members of the public would not appreciate having information about the class ...”

“... was needed, some suggested, was ‘therapeutic coitus’, expressed with total lack of courtesy by Peter of Spain, who believed in applying ‘plasters or women to the testicles’. A good thrashing was Bernard de Gordon’s cure. Others had more civilised ideas. Yet it was never at any time a very civilised area, for all its romantic associations. Wack ...”

“... correspondence: did Molyneux keep the letter out of fear, or pride? There can be no doubt why Peter George Patmore, father of the poet Coventry Patmore, kept the letters in which Hazlitt passionately poured out his rage and jealousy over Sara Walker, the daughter of his boarding-house keeper, ‘who leads a sporting life with everyone who comes in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... comedy without ever having much fun herself. Rather than a Modesty Blaise in the manner of Sir Peter Lely, a swaggering hedonist from the swinging 1660s, this is an Aphra for the soberly whiggish Nineties. The depressing thing is that Todd is often thoroughly convincing. On Behn’s reputation as a spy, for example, despite the publisher’s promise of ...”

“... sit in front of the television and watch Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. It contains people who read Country Living and worry about overpopulation and resource depletion and their pension funds and the way works of art are leaving Britain, but who don’t worry about the connection between these five things. It contains naturopaths and computer ...”

“... was clearly the fancied candidate for Sunday Times serialisation. Maxwell will hardly care to read that the London Daily News failed for a reason nobody dared tell him, ‘because of its parentage’, or that the portents for his ‘last dash for glory’ are both favourable and ominous. Which dash for glory would that be? He is capable of a good many ...”