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“... Friendship Association, an organisation firmly loyal to the Communist regime. Professor Leonard Hawkes, the leader of the delegation, was a geologist famous for pointing out that England was slowly tilting into the North Sea. The novelist and translator Rex Warner had been a left-winger in his youth but was now a comfortably-off, convivial ...”

“... placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week ...”

“... that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had, but when Auden gave his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry the following year I dutifully went along, knowing, though not quite why, that he was some sort of celebrity. At that time I still ...”

“... than in the post-October path towards terror and dictatorship. Orlando Figes, author of a widely read study of the revolution, The People’s Tragedy (1996), devotes a lively essay to showing that, had a disguised Lenin not been admitted without a pass to the Congress of Soviets on 24 October, ‘history would have turned out differently.’ In play here are ...”

“... towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library ...”

“... at Princeton, to which she had just donated them. She was by then in a wheelchair. Perhaps she read this letter, which uniquely reveals how creativity can be invested in the image of one person: What not only matters but is also absolutely necessary for me this moment is to think that I’m writing for you ... I follow this image of you, in the situations ...”

“... to a dead wife. But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that he kept her ...”

“... Bloomsbury, becoming a radical, anti-conformist appeal to individual choice along the way. Somehow Leonard Woolf’s socialism and Keynes-as-Bloomsberry are written out of this story, in which core values are undermined by a brilliant new scepticism: Lytton Strachey’s eagle-eyed Eminent Victorians (1918) is apparently a turning point. With Hayek’s success ...”

“... on West Side Story (1957), where he worked in lofty company – writer Arthur Laurents, composer Leonard Bernstein and director Jerome Robbins. The show was not just a hit but a turning point in musical theatre. Today, Sondheim feels he sometimes had the Jets and Sharks speaking too archly or poetically – his aim is to write natural, conversational ...”

“... on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy ...”

“... to Clive Bell, a number of the Bloomsbury set first heard ‘Prufrock’ in 1917, when Mansfield read it at Garsington: it ‘caused a stir, much discussion, some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more ...”

“... Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire. He was 17 years old and ‘long-haired, very handsome, very well read, a huge Bob Dylan fan’.Taupin moved in with the singer previously known as Reg; they slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom of the flat owned by Reg’s mother and her new husband in Frome Court in Pinner. ‘We would spend the days writing,’ Elton ...”

“... first three volumes in the Observer and proclaiming it ‘without doubt a great book’. Leonard Woolf called its scope ‘magnificent’. J.L. Hammond hailed its publication as ‘a deeply significant event’. A cynical view of such judgments is that they came from friends, or at least from sympathetic liberal internationalists who warmed to the ...”

“... now eager students stream to programmes like those of the Paideia Institute, where they not only read but speak, sing and rap in Latin while on summer courses in Rome. I have heard them in the basement of Pompey’s theatre, singing about the career of Julius Caesar in Latin, to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’ – and seen them, on the Appian ...”

“... in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. Near a ziggurat they unearthed evidence of the life and verse of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, said to have created the ...”