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“... This is Richard Evans’s second book on McEnroe. The Struwwelpeter of tennis is now 31 and No 4 in the international ratings. The first book, McEnroe: A Rage for Perfection, came out eight years ago when McEnroe was 23 and rated No 1. The new book belongs to the genre of defensive biography. It is as though Oliver had written a life of Roland: the wise, steady friend standing up for the brilliant, wayward hero ...”

“... a troupe of all the souls I might have known, crossing the seven bridges, one by one, like Struwwelpeter dolls, with ink for skin and nothing to keep them from harm but the promise of dawn. Rationing for Beginners When it no longer smells like an orchard gathering around me in the dark, the sense of a known Beloved that comes of garden work, the ...”

“... out, breasts lopped off and genitals horribly swollen and luridly aflame. Narokphum is a kind of Struwwelpeter sculpture garden, filled with the dire consequences of bad behaviour come from the mind of a raging celibate. A praed guilty of flirting with monks. Dante put some of his enemies in his Inferno while they were still living, but Luang Phor ...”

“... were told not to but being rescued from well-deserved disaster in the nick of time. I thought of Struwwelpeter. There at the Old Bailey was little Friedrich who tore wings off flies, and little Paulinchen who played with matches, and Phillipp who tilted his chair and brought the soup tureen over, and the ‘Grosse Nikolaus’ who dips small boys in his ...”

“... he insisted that he wrote verse, not poetry. His output ranged from those cautionary echoes of Struwwelpeter to roistering drinking songs, from tender lyrics to excoriatory ballades, from moral alphabets to ‘imitations and grotesques’ (among which must be counted his ‘Newdigate Poem’ in praise of ‘The Benefits of the Electric Light’: ‘A smell ...”

“... the same thing, and also for finding amusing fates for children – thumbs cut off by Scissormen (Struwwelpeter), death agonies brought on by chewing bits of string (Belloc) or being hurled with one’s twin from a cliff to see who would reach the bottom first (Captain Harry Graham). Saki, though, was often on the child’s side; he recognised, too, that ...”

“... among the pebbled bone helmets of snatch-squads. The mob awaits its impresario. Some shockheaded Struwwelpeter. A Malcolm McLaren whispering of historical precedents: Tyburn, the Gordon riots, Newgate ablaze, ‘Dickensian’ revengers pouring out of the slums and rookeries. It could catch on. It could be the next buzz. What was being declared here was not ...”

“... lurid colours, nursery rhyme names and hysterical laughter tightening into a soundless scream. Struwwelpeter. ‘The door flew open, in he ran,/the great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man.’ With his Jill Muttons, Solomon Straws and his ‘Well then, well met, Jack Edge,’ Binding drifts dangerously close to the mythical bucolic never-never land of Peter ...”

“... sister would inflict on the philosopher’s legacy and returning to the children’s book Struwwelpeter, announcing, according to his psychiatrist, that he had discovered its ‘secret’. This turned out to be that ‘a child must get presents, or else he will die or break into pieces or fly away.’ Afterwards, Benjamin was ambivalent about the ...”

“... did should have his balls snipped off and fastened to his nose with a safety-pin.’ Struwwelpeter meets The Bitch. In intimate matters, Coward’s stance within these journals is determinedly neutral without being neuter. ‘There will be books proving conclusively that I was homosexual and books proving equally conclusively that I was ...”

“... a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a piece. Nothing is true, not now. Horrors, incubated over ...”