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“... Not to know Goethe,’ A.W. Schlegel wrote poetically, ‘is to be a Goth.’ Nicholas Boyle begins the preface to Volume One of his biography of the great man by stating, altogether correctly alas, that more must be known, ‘or at any rate there must be more to know’, about him than about almost any other human being ...”

“... the absence from paradise. The words I have just quoted are the last words of the first volume of Nicholas Boyle’s biography of Goethe. The date is June 1790, and other things have been happening in Europe, to which Boyle immediately turns in his new book. Germany at this time was far from a nation state – it was a ...”

“... for all Jünger’s intelligence, from a conceptual currency debased by moral idiocy. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Foreword to The Dear Purchase, when this monograph appeared one of Stern’s older colleagues told him: ‘If you want to get on, do not write this sort of thing again.’ Stern, Boyle adds, ‘was ...”

“... with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight ...”

“... Scientific Revolution – the air-pump, whose proprietorship by his employer and patron, Robert Boyle, caused it to be known as the Machina Boyleana. Towards the end of his life, Hooke dabbled in pharmacology, besotted with the medical and psychedelic virtues of marijuana. He also announced, but did not choose publicly to demonstrate, his invention of ...”

“... to run. And that, too, is remarkable. For here is a Locke who collaborated with Robert Boyle, the man on whose premises (and in the hands of Robert Hooke) laboratory science arguably began. Here is the Locke who had significant if ill-understood relationships with Newton, our greatest theoretician. Here is an author who says at the outset that he ...”

“... precisely in their having expunged ‘Romantic’ ideas from their psychology. Part of Mary Boyle’s study of schizophrenia consists in examining quite why the category is used in the way it is: as a taxonomic catch-all that cannot hold, in any useful scientific sense, the varieties of behaviour it is asked to hold at the moment. If the Romantic legacy ...”

“... made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when ...”

“... where most others had not. The case resulted in her attackers being punished and Solicitor-General Nicholas Fairbairn MP being forced to resign. McWhinnie, the journalist who pursued the case, and Harper, the woman’s lawyer, have written a readable, unfussy account of the story and its implications for Scottish jurisprudence. Anyone who wishes to learn where ...”

“... as Gresham College, home of the Royal Society, was buzzing with the stooped mutterings of Robert Boyle, John Aubrey and Robert Hooke, so, Wall suggests, the unknown woman at home, experimenting with endive and plantin, or (in Partridge’s words) trussing woodcocks ‘into the Coffyn with swete larde around them’, was taking part in the same process of ...”

“... sanguinary career of Tamerlane for the Time-Life History of the World. After my editor, Charles Boyle, had read the first draft, he went home and dreamed a strange dream in which ‘Old Hoppity’ turned up at Time-Life’s London offices. The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It begins: A ...”

“... that the garden belonged to the widow of Scotland’s first Freudian psychoanalyst and father of Nicholas Fairbaim MP.) Various academics, actors, politicians – Labour and Nationalist – were there: Godfrey Quigley, playing Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin ...”

“... and 18th centuries. These men saw the body not as an economy of fluids but as a machine: Robert Boyle advised that the physician should ‘look on his Patients Body, as an Engine, that is out of Order’; Nicholas Robinson, that the human body was a machine with a system of ‘Springs, Wheels and Pullies’ that needed to ...”

“... were Apostles, which of them were homosexuals and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even G.M. Trevelyan’s ...”