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“... the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch. Other members of his family, including a much-loved uncle and aunt, were quite active supporters of the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) movement. Neither then nor in retrospect did he register any allegiance of that sort. Ignatieff ...”

“... of this kind only begin to occur about two thirds of the way into the novel, in Book XVII (‘Young America in Literature’), he starts out by deleting that and then goes on to cut Books XVIII (‘Pierre, as a Juvenile Author, Reconsidered’) and XXII (‘The Flower Curtain Lifted from before a Tropical Author; With Some Remarks on the Transcendental ...”

“... by a friend’s small press, it’s an apprentice work about a day in the life of a disturbed young literary man, Arthur Maxley, whose psychological problems seem at first to centre on his father (‘Father, Father, Father, he said to himself. What an ugly word’). In the end, it’s revealed that his bipolar ...”

“... John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to Ulysses, ‘he returned with his friend J.F. Byrne late at night to Byrne’s house at 7 Eccles ...”

“... plots it’s usually the men who have to face the moral consequences of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their ...”

“... dominant in a dormant or an indecent sort of way for many years. These were difficult cities for young men with literary ambitions; they were places in which both the present and the future seemed like a hundred years of solitude. These three cities, in which three geniuses felt trapped, isolated and dismayed, made their way slowly, inevitably into the ...”

“... of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’ and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.This time it’s different, however, not only ...”

“... The family were Greek-Orthodox Christians, converted to Anglicanism in the late 19th century. When young Edward’s vertebral slackness got too pronounced for them he was packed off to America, aged 15. He had never seen snow, and was compelled to invent a new personality at a puritanical New England boarding school. A few years later he escaped to ...”

“... obscure even to make it to the Dunciad, can be plausibly associated with several pamphlets, whilst Arthur Maynwaring is emerging from the shadows as a regular antagonist with the major authors of his day. Even where no such individual can be nailed for the disputed attribution, it is an advance if one can produce evidence equal or superior to that which has ...”

“... a non-starter, whether as wit or gentleman, for ‘squab’ also means an inexperienced person, young pigeon or unfledged bird. Birds came in handy, you might say, in lordly imputations of sexual inadequacy, as when Fielding called Lord Hervey Lord Didapper. The Earl was giving Dryden the ‘scribbling author’ the sort of lofty treatment which commoners ...”

“... don’t exist. John Howard has shown worthwhile leadership exactly once, when after the Port Arthur massacre in April 1996 he led the way on gun control, but having said then that we shouldn’t go down the American path, he’s been treading it ever since. He has expressed nostalgia for the way things were in the Fifties in his home suburb of ...”

“... from more recent conflicts – in Cambodia, for example. The Guardian reported in 1982 that young Argentinian soldiers captured in the Falklands ‘had been convinced that if they were captured they would be eaten’ – a variant of the cannibal imputation previously used by slave-traders to dissuade slaves from escaping to other masters or foreign ...”

“... the King ‘a jolly chap’, yet felt that there was ‘not much inside his head’. But then, as Arthur Balfour asked him, ‘whatever would you do if you had a ruler who had brains?’ The condescension was unkind, but the criticisms were not without their substance. It is not quite clear whether Kenneth Rose is happy with the direction in which this ...”

“... in the towns and ports of eighth and ninth-century Europe. Now Richard Hodges, himself a brilliant young English archaeologist and an acknowledged expert on the English and Continental pottery of the period, has written a book in which he seeks to establish the fact of early Medieval economic growth in northern Europe by means of archaeological evidence, and ...”

“... Three governesses, ‘mistresses of games and pleasures’, are employed to entertain the four young sons of the Austeur family. Although they have individual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), the governesses work as one. When they are at a loose end they like to ‘stroll through the garden together’ discussing their favourite t0pic of conversation ...”