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“... grateful for Taylor’s good opinion; and Coleridge, he assured Taylor, was properly penitent. As Kenneth Johnston has written: ‘If one were trying to cover over traces of youthful Jacobinism, what better way than to send a book of reformed poems to a potentially virulent enemy, and then follow it up with a fawning reply agreeing with his strictures against ...”

“... remark on his resemblance to Mr Spock or someone from outer space. Actually he looks like Kenneth Williams in one of those roles (Chauvelin, for instance) when the eyes suddenly go back and he goes wildly over the top. The smirking crew around Redwood are deeply depressing, Tony Marlow and Edward Leigh both fat and complacent and looking like two ...”

“... New Masses jeered at ‘the sex phobia of this six-year-old Proust’ and wondered why ‘so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working-class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels’. Roth – who had joined the Communist Party a few months before the book was published – took this kind ...”

“... least on the face of it, be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to masturbate ...”

“... is exempt from criminal indictment; the list of sexually graphic questions he prepared for Kenneth Starr to ask Bill Clinton during the Clinton impeachment proceedings; and the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents relating to his work in the Bush administration which the Republicans are refusing to release – covering, among other things, his ...”

“... coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the ...”

“... The subject of a 1938 Spencer Tracy movie, it had a reputation for turning troublemakers into nice young men, and was the gentlest place he could have hoped for. But after four days, he and a boy called Blackie Nelson broke out, stole a car, got hold of a gun, robbed a grocery store and a casino, and headed for Peoria. There the pair became apprentices to ...”

“... a party turn. Vasari makes much of Leonardo’s lively and witty conversation (though he was too young to have heard it himself), but I have also an opposite impression: a man prone to long discomfiting silences; a solitary who loved the company of animals. ‘Man has great power of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false; animals have little, but ...”

“... and reassesses Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World (1977). A stocky heavy-headed young man, I used to see him at Oxford seemingly always on his way back from squash. I knew at the time he was formidably clever and from a distance (with me it was always from a distance) fancied him rotten. On reflection, it was partly his name I found so ...”

“... corps called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which Khomeini had set up to harness the young ideologues who had brought him to power. It immediately entered into rivalry with the regular forces, whom Khomeini suspected – rightly, in the case of some officers – of favouring a restoration of the monarchy. Hossein had become leader of his group of ...”

“... the Second World War and now St Lucian pig farmer, is obsessed with Helen, the proud and beautiful young woman who used to work as his wife Maud’s maid. He identifies her with her island and tries to discover its ‘true place’ in imperial history. Together, his obsession and research make him neglect Maud and at her death, filled with remorse, he gives ...”

“... was master in his own house whereas Kasmin had a backer, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a young Guinness heir. Another was that Fraser lacked the experience in running a gallery that Kasmin had. Born in 1934, Kasmin had worked from 1956 to 1958 at Gallery One under Victor Musgrave, a true pioneer who in the 1950s was the first dealer in London to show ...”

“... or call what he had ample reason – the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall – to suppose was only the young President’s bluff? The crisis in the Cuban missile crisis ended halfway into the second day – Wednesday 24 October – when a meeting between Kennedy and his advisers was interrupted by a report that six Soviet ships had stopped in mid-ocean rather than ...”

“... himself (who also funded it with a legacy from his grandfather), Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. Like most avant-garde magazines, Locus Solus (named after Roussel’s second prose novel, published in 1914, and with an epigraph from his final long poem, from 1932, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique), was founded primarily as a forum for the work ...”

“... with such inscriptions as ‘Babies’ and ‘Children’. Last week Queen Mary was here, and young Mr Blunt, who is on our staff, was presented to her, as his aunt happens to be the chief official of the Needlework Guild. By this time the idea of incorporating the institute into the University of London had been raised, and in July 1939, after the last ...”