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“... 65 hours’ and she was left ‘badly torn’. They called the baby Gavin after Gavin Douglas, the Scottish medieval poet and translator of the Aeneid, but neither of them was suited to parenting. Willa’s relationship with her own mother was difficult and she avoided contact with her handicapped brother. As a new parent, she kept a journal in ...”

“... version of Thomas Chatterton’s (already fake) mode. Another poem in his ambit is probably Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl (1985), a dream-allegorical confrontation in which malign powers are named with outlandish blazons such as ‘Zandra’, ‘Saatchi’ and ‘Margaret’. In a moving climax, Oliver’s dreamer lying ‘in my grey ...”

“... to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired colleague/bugbear. To Douglas in 1945 he describes him as ‘arse over ...”

“... celebrity Axel Munthe. His extraordinary memoir, The Story of San Michele, was published by John Murray in 1929, when Munthe was 72. The first edition rapidly sold out; it went into its 20th impression in January 1931, and has been in print ever since.* The reasons for its wide and enduring appeal have to do partly with its subject-matter – Munthe led a ...”

“... rehabilitation of probability in relation to certainty – could have been strengthened had Douglas Lane Patey’s work been taken into account. But the general character of his method is clear. His defence of rhetoric is itself not rhetorical but rational. One senses that he would scorn the idea of persuading an academic reader by emotive ...”

“... been specially translated for this work.’ That is untrue. There are the familiar translations by Douglas Hyde, Frank O’Connor, Cecile O’Rahilly, Standish O’Grady, Thomas Kinsella and others, as well as the contributing editors. The advantage here is that readers taken with these excerpts should be able to obtain fuller texts through libraries. There is ...”

“... the White House, who kept telling us . . . that the system was perfectly sound, who sent General Douglas MacArthur to burn the camp of the unemployed war veterans who had come to appeal to Washington, we wondered about the survival of representative American institutions; and we became more and more impressed by the achievements of the Soviet ...”

“... as a puritanically radical journal, under the influence of the ‘savage little Robespierre’, Douglas Jerrold. In 1846, Punch changes direction, and dedicates itself to apolitical fun. Dickens, among others, objected to the ensuing ‘eternal guffaw’ with its narcotic implication that nothing under the sun is serious or urgent. But Dickens’s own ...”

“... a novelist. The very title reminds us he was a Victorian, only two years younger than Lord Alfred Douglas. His most celebrated novels of English life were published in the 1930s. Then he moved to Wales, became very Cymric, historical and metaphysical; a sage, visited by disciples, he wrote of mysteries and antiquities until his death, aged 91, in 1963. After ...”

“... circuit that brought Harrison into contact with the Maitlands, the Darwins, the Cornfords, Gilbert Murray and Roger Fry. But, as Beard admits, Harrison’s work was always better known beyond the community of classicists. Her concern with origins – whether of human feelings or their enactment in cults and religions – was part of the zeitgeist. In the ...”

“... terminology of later zealots – a thesis confirmed for Mao in the autumn of 1950, when General Douglas MacArthur, at the head of a mostly American army, invaded North Korea, proclaiming his intention of destroying the regime of Mao’s friend-in-need, Kim Il Sung. After a clear warning Mao threw 300,000 PLA into the Korean fighting, out-generalled and ...”

“... he said of that time. Snobbery was an even less sympathetic part of the story. When Gilbert Murray got him to write The Problems of Philosophy for the Home University Library, Russell referred to the assignment contemptuously, described it as a ‘shilling shocker’, said it was ‘philosophy for the Midwest’ and intended to enlighten shop ...”

“... chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, nicknamed ‘La Brioche’ for the way she curled her hair, and started an affair. Barney became jealous, dubbed van Zuylen a fat Valkyrie, and was too busy ...”

“... Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the ...”