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“... younger of whom, Ian, b. 1908, inevitably became the family handful. Things were not helped by the wills of Val and Robert, which absent-mindedly or maliciously left the boys’ mother, Eve, with not quite enough money. Ian did so-so at school, and then was kicked out of Sandhurst in inglorious circumstances. A girl he was chasing had a long-standing promise ...”

“... de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded their tavern conversation with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to ...”

“... he throws himself through the trapdoor into the cellar at the age of three, and there and then wills himself to stop growing. End of Entwicklung with a vengeance. What this fairy-tale of outrageous absurdity suggests is that there is no other way of coping with, and making sense of, the hideous events and encounters of the adult world, and also that this ...”

“... and Veronika Weiss. Rodger then went on a drive-by shooting spree through Isla Vista, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a student at UCSB, with a single bullet to the chest inside a Deli Mart, and wounding 14 others. He eventually crashed his BMW coupé at an intersection. He was found dead by the police, having shot himself in the head. In the ...”

“... of postwar hopefulness that things could change. My editor during those excited days of hope, Christopher Falkus at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, asked me to contribute to a book of essays by women on what they thought had shaped them as women. The Virgin Mary was the single most dominant and crucial element in my female life so far, and so I wrote a short piece ...”

“... haut-bourgeois clone-town lined with retailers familiar to us from London: JoJo Maman Bébé, Jack Wills, Lush and Kiehl’s. Immediately outside the gates to the castle precinct a young homeless man slumped unconscious in a doorway – I photographed him as we went by, and someone passing the other way tutted at the image-theft. Once again, despite the ...”

“... final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent … a sane, courteous and ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... chest-curls for the stroller in Mediterranean gardens; Wild Bunch outrider, Slim Pickens or Chill Wills with badlands barbering. Moorcock has more hats than Winston Churchill. He distrusts expensive eau de Cologne newcomers with their anorexic novellas: no gravitas, no gravy. He despises the nouvelle cuisine portions served up on mid-culture chat shows. Down ...”

“... produced in a single instant of scholarly insight. Chapman’s version is quite different. Like Christopher Logue’s violent adaptations of the Iliad, it testifies to a lifetime’s battle with thoughts and afterthoughts, a continual argument between the translator’s own preoccupations and his sense of what is distinctive to Homer. Chapman’s project ...”

“... confusion, a last gasp of flair in the Regency, after which came what the architectural historian Christopher Hussey described as ‘the great debacle of Victorianism’.That this view and these three centuries have come to stand for the essence of British architectural history is largely owed to one book, John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain ...”

“... and lying in wait – and singsong conjecture that imagines the shape of a poetic encounter, then wills it to happen. In his introduction, Mason brushes past the ‘Last Poems’, taking us straight from the summer of 1871, when Rimbaud composed ‘Le Bateau ivre’, shortly before joining Verlaine in Paris, to the summer of 1873, when he finalised A Season ...”

“... quod sum: fac de me secundam voluntatem tuam ... Why, if God creates us and does with us what he wills – that is to say, predestines us to be what we are – why are we so evil? No doctor of the Church gave a more authoritative and exhaustive answer to that question than St Augustine. In his great dispute with Pelagius he argued that the Pelagian doctrine ...”

“... by specific occasion or active collaboration to have known Shakespeare personally, which relegates Christopher Marlowe to a glowering presence on the sidelines, and also excludes that engaging gadfly Thomas Nashe, though both had a decisive stylistic influence on Shakespeare in the 1590s, and both must surely have known him. I would also have liked more about ...”

“... Coldstream Guards, then studied for the Bar, then took up stockbroking, and worked for a while for Wills cigarettes; in the prewar social whirl, it didn’t seem to matter that he wasn’t settling down. He was enjoying himself, and reading a lot and making friends. In biographies of the period, a group photograph of famous faces will look out at us, and there ...”