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“... dared to tap him on the shoulder, he was shocked. ‘My first wife,’ he remonstrated, ‘was a Percy and she would not have dared to presume so far.’ Habakkuk thinks he was ‘pathological’, but the preoccupation with station was general. In Constantinople in 1810, the young Lord Byron was invited to join the ...”

“... 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan warriors. There was a need to face the facts of war. Percy Hennell made records of reconstructive surgery; in the exhibition you can see a soldier who has had the socket of his lost eye patched over with a flap of skin. The police wanted mugshots for their records. A collage of ten ‘known militant ...”

“... Ford, then 40 years old and feeling it, found himself for a while in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Review, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured ...”

“... omnivorous and discriminating in his reading (garbage in; synthesis out – a good maxim for any young reader-for-pleasure setting out on life’s road). He cited authors as various as Lion Feuchtwanger and Rudyard Kipling, and didn’t bluff about a book he hadn’t read. And we know that he was excessively fond of the theatre. But he never alluded to the ...”

“... visit to Persia; never one to rebel against her parents’ wishes, she broke the engagement. (The young man, Henry Cadogan, was drowned not long after her departure.) Freya was jilted by the Italian doctor to whom she became engaged during the First World War; and, according to her own account (though this has never been confirmed by the man’s family), she ...”

“... is meant as a joke. 15 January. Go into the chemist in Camden High Street to find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorising the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying: ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole shop’s mine. It’s bought ...”

“... they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked on his own biography of the sculptor William ...”

“... way. We have ‘Hilda’s Tale’: the background of her life until she sold her garden to Percy Thrower. There follows the ‘Detective’s Tale’: a factual account of the original police investigations. The ‘Doctor’s Tale’ outlines the findings of the young – by Home Office pathologist standards – Dr ...”

“... Savoy in 1823 in the same carriage as Mary Shelley and observing her as she checked her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too as deserving them. This is the letter of an unusually ...”

“... Hunt’s comment in an article of 1863 that Shelley probably contracted venereal disease as a young man, and proceed to examine his illnesses and hypochondria in the light of medical thinking at the time. They then consider metaphors of disease and healing – particularly sexual disease and sexual healing – in Shelley’s poetry. Finally, a verdict of ...”

“... of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post. The version of this incident in ...”

“... the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Times and a clutch of periodicals. Cudlipp, whose brothers Percy and Reg were already newspapermen, was attracted by the glamour and excitement which they seemed to enjoy, as well as by the prospect of free tickets to the theatre. At an age when King had been in his second year at Winchester, Cudlipp was a probationer on ...”

“... the obsessive chatter of the continuum. Older people need each other because of it. It keeps them young by reminding them that youth is a state we carry helplessly around in our peer-group: those who are just beginning life can be seen to be much more grown-up. All the infirmities of age – white whine swilling, importunate bladders, evenings beginning after ...”

“... With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous fascination’ with the detailed preparation. He caught the mood of the moment. ‘No one can measure the consequences,’ he recorded; ‘we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance ...”

“... new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is concerned with young people of the Dutch East Indies in the 1890s, almost choked with different roots – religions, races, cultures, classes – all sprouting wildly. The resemblances struck me when I started reading the Indonesian novel as an invigorating respite, after the ...”