“... carapaces into the Beagle’s wake. Four small tortoises did make it back to England but were too young to have developed island-specific characteristics. The finches – emblematic of Darwin’s greatest Galapagos triumph – were in fact his nadir. Not only did he fail to label which islands his specimens came from, but he completely overlooked the ...”

“... platforms, some dotted with information about a famous person from the past (Erasmus Darwin or Robert McNamara), as though a documentary script were in the making or a history seminar had just finished. Or, finally, a kiosk cobbled together from plastic and plywood, and filled, like a homemade study-shrine, with images and texts devoted to a particular ...”

“... be seen in their writings, which sought a revival of the fortunes of the kingdom and saw in the young Edward the true gold they were seeking. Particular attention is paid to alchemists with Court connections, such as Thomas Norton, Robert Barker and George Ripley, whom Hughes represents as exercising a shaman-like ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... leap from empty hedonism to murderous heroism is also a recurring theme in the biographies of the young men who leave Bradford, Hamburg, Paris and Oslo for Syria. As Borchgrevink writes, Breivik’s hatred of Islam didn’t prevent him from proposing a tactical alliance with al-Qaida against the liberal state he hated even more. The desires that motivated him ...”

“... Debutante’, conjures up the atmosphere of paternal tyranny and filial insubordination. Its young heroine, Lucretia, likes to play with her rocking horse, Tartar, even though her father (‘the bastard’) has forbidden it; when he catches her, he throws Tartar into the fire, producing ‘the most frightful neighing … as if an animal were suffering ...”

“... rules for strictly settling those estates on male heirs. Indeed, when the danger arose that a young male heir might gamble away his estate, or even convert it to cash in order to pay his commercial creditors, the courts displayed little eagerness to encourage the alienability of land. In 1815 the House of Lords rejected a Commons Bill that would have made ...”

“... sure, lay voices are heard, insistently and often discordantly, throughout this book. There is the young Nuland who witnessed the death of his mother and his grandmother; there is the adult Nuland whose physician’s sang froid deserts him in the face of his beloved older brother’s death. The book may teem with quotations from Rilke, Tolstoy, Montaigne and ...”

“... to others. And they stand in contrast to another group of beliefs held on the whole by the young – concerning the special Scottish contribution to bawdy songs, drunken conviviality, early class consciousness, hardiness and poverty. Items from both sets of belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of most of these books. Derick ...”

“... which plainly 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 Nicholas succeeded as tsar in ...”

“... or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion or ideology. Which put the young of the Fifties at a disadvantage, especially as they were so small a generation. ‘There were so few of you,’ one of Sayre’s professors recalled nostalgically in 1969, the year of the Harvard strike, ‘it was easy to push you around.’ No wonder ...”

“... the agreement still held. By now the Serbs had drifted away from the discussion and the crowd of young Albanians seated on the ground around him weren’t so sure. ‘They are all deeply involved with the police so they want to leave,’ they said of the Serb villagers. ‘Two Serbs with flak jackets came to the shop and drank beer – we did not stop ...”

“... Seventy-four at the time, and three years from death, he probably said it to annoy the serious young dons in the serious new English departments, and he certainly succeeded. It pleased him not only to be a voice from the past, but a voice of almost youthful irresponsibility, dissent, blasphemy, iconoclasm. And it pleased him no doubt to dis-identify ...”

“... he to proselytise. One report has it that he ripped out and sent seven pages of the book to his young sister, Jennifer, just before the bombing. What she told Jennings was that her brother gave her the whole novel to read ‘several years ago’. This is evidently the family line: ‘I know he’s read it, I’ve read it. A lot of people say it’s a racist ...”

“... 44 by a self-destructive death. It showed what confusion there was in the early development of a young artist of limited talent and uncertain direction. It demonstrated how he found within himself an intuition of the course he had to take, an uncharted course for which he was uniquely suited. It proved that by the time he was in his mid-thirties he had ...”