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“... rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The young Babbage was a good mathematician by international standards, at a time (the 1810s) when English maths was generally backward. He conceived his first calculating-machine in 1821, when he was 30. Thereafter he did no interesting work in mathematics, not even ...”

“... usual suspects) peasants attending a market fair unleashed their rage on a hapless young nobleman named Alain de Monéys, a short, balding bachelor with ‘a local reputation for politeness and generosity’ who had made the mistake of arriving at the fairground in the wake of his despised cousin, Camille de Maillard. Accused by the crowd of ...”

“... his one attempt at loving someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, ‘How kind you are to yourself,’ and tells him to ‘rest easy’. ‘After all,’ she says, ‘that is where your happiness lies.’ Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a ...”

“... In the village of Les Estables, near the mountain of Gerbier de Jonc, where the Loire rises, a young geometer participating in the first attempt to map the whole of France is hacked to pieces by the locals. We are in the early 1740s: an increasingly powerful monarchy is seeking to control the ‘jumble of old fiefdoms’, but the rural population see ...”

“... or fairies. When Synge quickened a fire by holding a newspaper against the mouth of the chimney, a young woman called him a sorcerer: ‘It’s to hell you’ll be going by and by.’ When the De Profundis was recommended to Synge to ward off evil spirits it was clear to him that the traffic also flowed in the opposite direction. Or in every direction: the ...”

“... with Love (1959), an autobiographical account of the hostility and prejudice he encountered as a young schoolteacher in the East End, gets only a fleeting namecheck. And it’s remarkable how few artists and writers are featured. Their inclusion would presumably strike the authors as being too evocative of those cheerful Commission for Racial Equality ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... of ‘undesirables’ in the summer of 1940 included nearly ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her ...”

“... of Lady Cunard (whom he detested), he was now able to launch himself, a successful and unattached young literary lion, into loftier social circles. Mr Amory has edited the letters meticulously. To a letter of July 1931 he appends 31 footnotes identifying those mentioned. They include one future duke, one earl, one younger son of a marquess, one daughter of a ...”

“... I propose to leave the first two out of discussion: The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast, ‘a fantasy for young readers’ that is as hard-edged and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember ...”

“... sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel Snow has Lewis Eliot observe usefully: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping ...”

“... offered a seat if the bus or tram were crowded. In London I can never get to a seat in time – a young boy or girl always gets in ahead of me. Now I am back in England and what do I find? The affair of the Falkland Islands is again running in full spate. The Franks Committee had completed its investigations before I returned. It seemed to be high ...”

“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...”

“... into Sonora. The wolf is soon taken from him, as ‘contraband’, as the horse is taken from the young boy in All the Pretty Horses. After being exhibited in a fair, she is set to fight against dogs on a hacienda: wolf-baiting as a sport for the betting man. In a spectacular scene, Billy rescues the wolf from her tormentors, but only at the ...”

“... not only did it do splendidly at the box office, but it also won the endorsement of both the young Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with Sartre (whose life is strikingly similar to that of Brecht) learning the catchy tunes by heart.’ As an approach, this is about as discriminating as the ducking-stool, and will no doubt draw similar circles of ...”