“... He looked around, his eyes alighting upon Jason Joslin – J.J. to his friends – a smug young man of modest origins who had, by fair means or foul, clawed his way to considerable wealth. Witness the Armani suit and the gold cufflinks that protruded a full three inches from the sleeves of his jacket. ‘I give way.’ ‘The honourable gentleman ...”

“... seats to lead the third-largest party in Israel. Polls also show that significant numbers of young Israelis approve of his radical ideas. More socially respectable voices, such as that of Rehavam Zevi, the leader of the Moledet Party which also advocates expulsion of the Arabs, have cashed in on his appeal. While the movement he heads remains both small ...”

“... a white eyeball wrapped in layers of brown linen’ and the geologist tells him that chert is the young Palestinians’ favourite throwing stone: ‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the stones”.’ ‘Elterwater, 12 August ...”

“... did they make of him? Peering at the mature student Dunn hard at work at his window, the local young women in rollers find ‘a specimen under glass, being protected,/And laugh at me watching them’. Except for a single moment of first-person plural solidarity, in ‘Ins and Outs’, the inhabitants of Terry Street are always ‘they’, not ‘we’, the ...”

“... cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his title in the university catalogue from ‘professor’ to ‘swami’; teach ‘The Wisdom of the East’ instead of ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner’; and replace the furniture in his office with a simple ...”

“... It seems more likely that it stems from the influence of his other great mentor and guide when a young man, the Australian priest Peter Thomson, who became Blair’s closest friend and confidant while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. When Thomson died earlier this year, Blair said at his funeral: ‘There are few people of whom you can say: he changed my ...”

“... breast-styles for the nurse which were not those that applied to a high-born or beautiful young mother.) Classical medical theory supported the value of wet-nursing – Aristotle had thought the thin watery milk of the new mother was bad for babies. Husbands also found it more convenient to have their wives give the children to another to ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... the walls. Instead she constructs a version of the party in her imagination, in which a lonely young woman guest will be her friend. The old woman begins picking at a tiny dent in the plaster on the wall between the houses, tearing and pulling until she removes enough plaster to see light from the neighbours’ kitchen. She squeezes into the space between ...”

“... where he made friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist for Richard Rodgers. (The young Sondheim went to see their pioneering show Oklahoma! when it opened in 1943.) Hammerstein recognised Sondheim’s talent, began to educate him in musical theatre and became a father-figure. It comes as a modest surprise now when Sondheim makes clear how ...”

“... between Poles and Germans. The congregation, filling the church to overflowing, is predominantly young, sober, attentive and earnest. Unfortunately the sermon, and the bidding prayers, both entirely unintelligible to me, are so extended that I am obliged to leave before the Mass is over in order to meet the British Council driver who is to take me to ...”

“... couple, who did so much to uphold decent family values in the rackety era of the Bright Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed with characteristic precision, ‘the royal family.’ And think of Elizabeth and Philip, whose domestic felicity was ...”

“... which has had the greatest influence on Brecht’s Britsh successors, including both the Angry Young Men of the late Fifties and the generation of British playwrights who were formed by the student revolts of the following decade. Brecht’s challenge to the inevitable does not imply a denial of causality: his invitation to the audience is precisely to ...”

“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... but little is made of it. On other subjects that might be expected to figure in the life of a young prince – servants, animals – there is surprisingly little. As Wilhelm grows older, politics plays a growing part. Between the lines there is much to be learnt about the crown prince syndrome, that golden oldie of European history, or about the role ...”