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“... of the jungle merge with the yet more dangerous chimera of the imagination. Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett – he is always styled ‘Colonel’: a piece of discreet self-promotion – was born in Torquay in 1867. His father was a blue-blooded spendthrift and crony of the Prince of Wales, who died young of ...”

“... model – his assumption that the average English schoolboy was as neglected by his parents as young Eric Blair had been. ‘Editors had to tread a fine line between two markets, the positive children’s one and the negative parents’ one.’ Exciting the juvenile reader without provoking their parents was never an easy trick. It is a limitation that ...”

“... Rozanov had made an unnecessary journey from Moscow to Gorky, simply in order to sleep with a young blind woman.’ He is a poet, she is a student of his work whom he has never met before. It is a hot October night in the early 1980s and after copulation (‘acrobatic but lacking in finesse’), Rozanov and his partner find themselves unable to sleep. He ...”

“... and relates, as evidence of the pioneer cosmonaut’s humanity, an act of kindness to a certain young poet (can it be ... yes, it was). The epilogue goes back in time to the pre-Revolutionary period and the philosopher Tsiolkovsky, whom Yevtushenko hails as the spiritual father of manned space research. Tsiolkovsky evidently promulgated a vitalist ...”

“... endured by a child dying of tuberculous meningitis or paralysed by spinal disease, the notion of a young life being extinguished after a slow decline was once the inspiration of many novels and much poetry. In The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos remark how death from consumption, because ‘it was believed to affect chiefly sensitive natures . . . could be ...”

“... has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there were two early 20th-century lives, her correspondence with the Duke of Clarence was edited and published by Arthur ...”

“... and yet not cause offence. He aims in life for the same perilous liberty as, in a letter to the young actor Esmé Percy (15 March 1913), he ascribes to certain of the roles in his plays – ‘those very dangerous parts of mine, which consist of saying things which are unpardonable if uttered by unprivileged ...”

“... by students on first acquaintance, partly through a priggishness which will allow only the young to talk dirty. But he comes into his own in the graduate school and the Zapp-it-to-me international seminars, where priggishness takes more unnatural and exclusive forms. Yet little of this helps the poor biographer. S/he can lay out all the ‘bobs and ...”

“... thought that I could not be hurt’. ‘Incredible,’ said a fellow teacher, ‘that one so young could have experienced anything so devastating.’ What in fact had touched off the poem was that ‘the poet’s grandmother had accidentally smudged a pastel drawing of which Sylvia was particularly proud.’ The death of her father when she was eight ...”

“... and Sixties he became the acknowledged sage of Anglo-American war studies, always ready to help young researchers and delighting in the homage implied by requests to consult him. Danchev cites an extraordinary number of scholars and soldiers who admit a debt to him. I would probably be on the list myself had I had the sense to accept the offer of an ...”

“... might have been a little impatient with provincial life in the South Pacific. My friend Graham Percy (who came from Auckland) talked about us as belonging to the Wellington mandarin class, but within that class there were divisions. My mother didn’t, and I think didn’t want to, join the university wives who walked and talked and lunched together. Her ...”

“... law and the ideological attachments jurists bring to their cases. Sands portrays the Australian Percy Spender and the American Stephen Schwebel, two judges who served as president of the ICJ in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, as legally enrobed imperial apologists – though he doesn’t quite call them that. During a case brought by Liberia and Ethiopia ...”

“... Spinkwell Mills, now Sprinkwell Mills (the need for the extra ‘r’ is a mystery), mostly to young professionals working in Leeds. And the beds are everywhere. On the other side of the ring-road, as if squaring up to Machell’s, there is the enormous redbrick expanse of Highgate Beds: Sleeping Comfort for Everybody. Along Bradford Road and Huddersfield ...”

“... sort, he soaked himself in opera, and grew confident, though possibly no more than many other young men, of some sort of future greatness. At 20, having moved with the family to London, he was ghosting music criticism for Lee and writing stories, book reviews and part of a play about Jesus. The ‘pale, private Shaw’ he then was decided to be a ...”

“... Buchs, on the Swiss-Austrian frontier,’ he writes:We were invaded by six or seven very young Nazi officials, who took stock of our money and pored over our passports … I was bringing with me for a friend two English sporting guns, and these caused much speculation among the Nazi officials, who wanted to know the military value of such guns. I ...”