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“... and multilingual population, Mołodeczno (its Polish name). More ironies here, as, when the young Bauman entered the local gymnasium, he became such an exemplar of Polishness – ‘no one around spoke Polish as pure and refined as mine’ – that the deputy headmaster, a Belarusian nationalist, took against him. But no matter: Bauman quickly taught ...”

“... East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered reminiscences of Arthur Harding, a man described to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Police in 1907 as ‘a most slippery and dangerous criminal’. In their way, both books are irritating, inadequate, even incoherent: but they also give a vivid, horrifying, unforgettable ...”

“... from the knight who is questioning him, as it indicates high status. He determines to go to King Arthur and get himself made a knight. Before he sets out, his mother gives him instructions on how to behave in the world, and tells him something of his own history how his father and brothers were killed in combat and she had withdrawn to the forest to preserve ...”

“... and carefully to record all variants indicated by real-life evidence. Thus: ‘When the young Paul Morel goes out, it is with his younger brother Arthur; they are “the lads”. When Lawrence went out to play, it would have been with [his sister] Ada.’ Or: ‘Lydia Lawrence’s reaction to her husband probably ...”

“... this occasion. Monday 17 October was a different story: the Police were confronted by quite a few young men: we were not running away any more. Confrontation took place on the tip – miners versus police. For a brief time we had shown that the people of Grimethorpe had had enough. The police station was stoned, and windows broken. By three in the afternoon ...”

“... Yeats summed up his generation’s complaint: ‘The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – “When he should have been broken-hearted,” said Verlaine, “he had many reminiscences” – the political eloquence of Swinburne, the ...”

“... disappointment, not so much at the excavation site itself (‘where,’ he writes archly, ‘Sir Arthur Evans … is rebuilding the palace’) but at its collection of prize paintings and sculpture, which had been removed to the museum in Heraklion. In the sculpture, he ‘saw nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all’. The frescoes were much ...”

“... the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint ...”

“... and reissued for the centenary. Appearing for the first time is an account written in the 1930s by Arthur Beecroft of the Royal Engineers for his son Bobby, to counteract the pacifist revisionism that he thought was painting him (like all his comrades-in-arms) as ‘a poor bemused fool who was led blindfold to the slaughter, and who had not the gumption to see ...”

“... inquiry and wish it elsewhere: there is a story – possibly ben trovato – that when two young men ventured to discuss a philosophical problem in his hearing, he rapped sharply on the table with his pipe and called out: ‘No thinking, gentlemen, please.’ Again, he was ignorant and intolerant of the developing physical sciences, and could speak of ...”

“... about the Munich Air Disaster of February 1958, when the plane bringing home United’s prodigious young team from a European Cup tie in Belgrade failed to take off from a slush-covered runway in Munich and ploughed into a house and a tree. Eight players died, including my father’s hero from radio commentaries and newspaper reports, Duncan Edwards, the ...”

“... went with it. Yeats first met Beardsley at the launch party for the Savoy, the magazine founded by Arthur Symons and Beardsley after Beardsley had been fired as art editor of the Yellow Book following Wilde’s arrest. It was a brave and defiant attempt to continue the movement, but the journal was suspect from the start – the Savoy, after all, was the hotel ...”

“... there was extensively refortified in the post-Roman period, causing some believers in the King Arthur legend to imagine it as the original Camelot, but their imagination will not have stretched to the notion of the Knights of the Round Table grave-robbing for pots. It’s worth pointing out that there is no entry for ‘King ...”

“... should fall for this Parisian nonsense, but makes a more positive attempt to convict the young man of heresy. He claims, quite rightly, that Lodge uses a very limited set of structuralist tools, but thinks that he has lost the caution that marked his earlier ventures, and is ‘now ready to practise structuralism in the open streets’. And although ...”

“... rights and wrongs, do’s and don’t’s. It is characteristic that Greene should commission a young and comparatively untried man as his biographer and give him so much help and freedom. In so doing, he has served himself and the reader well. Here is the sympathetic, but not uncritical wherewithal to form a fair impression of an important and deeply ...”