“... are two stories here, the public and the private one. The public story should have gone like this: young, fair-haired Guards officer, keen as mustard, goes to the wars, performs deeds of derring-do, is badly wounded, shipped – and flown – home to a hero’s welcome. But the hero’s welcome was missing. The walking wounded were greeted at RAF Brize Norton ...”

“... tell their story: ‘the work had changed so very much after the horses had gone ... so that the young men and the retired workers had very little in common ... the old were glad of someone to talk to.’ The books of the Sixties and Seventies elaborated the pattern laid out in the first, as did his short stories in Acky (1973), and his fiction for ...”

“... habits – keeping the grown-ups at home in the evenings in front of their sets and driving the young out to the cinema and the pubs – and has revolutionised electioneering and other forms of marketing. It is equally a matter of common observation that sound radio retains a role, even if it is only to provide something – anything – to listen to for ...”

“... of it. Bernal’s decision to make his career in England was nothing extraordinary. A promising young crystallographer might take the same decision just as easily today. The political rhetoric (whether Nationalist or Loyalist) according to which London and Dublin are conceived as ‘foreign powers’ is doubtless diplomatically correct. But I would guess ...”

“... narrative of the Fall gave way to a sense of history as progress and steady enlightenment, the young who represented the future were more to be admired and imitated. By the same token, fat, with its associations of deliquescence, was also undesirable. By the end of the 18th century thinness was more or less permanently in. A fat Romantic was anathema, as ...”

“... in North-West Europe, the English practised ‘neo-local’ residence: on marrying, a young couple would settle in a separate household near their parents. Marriages tended to be consensual rather than enforced by parental fiat, contracted in the partners’ mid-to-late twenties, and producing five or six children: this was a ‘low ...”

“... of Oakland, can you provide me with a valid reason for what took place the other night to that young man, for being shot in his back?’ He and several others then fell to the ground, lying face down with their hands behind their backs, re-enacting the moment when Grant’s life began to end. In the chaos that ensued, Ron Dellums, Oakland’s ...”

“... used to be a key term in the civilising process: finishing schools taught young ladies to walk with a book balanced on their head. Keep that head up and tuck that tail in! Bumsters from ‘Nihilism’, S/S 1994 ‘Highland Rape’, A/W 1995 Shaun Leane’s spine corset for ‘Untitled’, S/S 1998 ‘The Widows of Culloden’, A/W ...”

“... Colonial rule, as a government model, was closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’ It is ...”

“... and advertising had become essential to the modern electoral campaign. Everyone remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs ...”

“... adjacent to ‘Vaselino’ is ‘dandy’, which Valentino played to the hilt. In The Young Rajah, as in other roles, he ‘dons jangling bracelets on his wrists and forearms and a ring for every finger. Bare-chested, he’s covered with brown body paint and draped with ropes of twined pearls.’ Natacha thought that Rudy ‘looked best ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... of biblical truth. For the modern reader, such relentless classicism can cause odd problems. As David Daiches once remarked, we are often in the uncomfortable position of forming our knowledge of classical mythology by inferring from Miltonic allusion. Most modern students probably first encounter Ovid’s Narcissus through Milton’s Eve, gazing on her own ...”

“... In his story​ ‘The Student’, Chekhov writes of a young seminarian who comes across two widows warming themselves at a fire: And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better ...”