“... speech in the parliamentary debates on the second reading of the first Reform Bill was made by the young MP for the rotten Wiltshire borough of Calne, Thomas Babington Macaulay. He denounced the aristocracy’s blind insensitivity to the upper middle classes from which he came. He stressed the contribution that class could and should make to politics. It was ...”

“... anatomy? But if he was capable, why did he never marry? Brooke may have fallen in love as a young man, even becoming briefly engaged to a vicar’s daughter, and later there was a wealthy woman who became infatuated with him and lent him money. Barley concludes, however, that he was not much interested in women. On the other hand, he shows that the ...”

“... About ten years ago, I heard Edward Thompson give a public lecture at Harvard University. He was not then an internationally renowned spokesman for the peace movement: there was at that point no peace movement of any consequence to be a spokesman for. He was, however, one of the most influential historians of his time ...”

“... Dr Leete tells Julian West as he stirs from his slumbers. ‘Your appearance is that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily condition seems not too greatly different from that of one just roused from a somewhat long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day of September in the year 2000, and you have slept exactly 113 years, three ...”

“... Tom Hargreaves​ , the anti-hero of Megan Nolan’s second novel, is young, bland-faced and good at ingratiating himself in places he doesn’t belong. A journalist for the Daily Herald, he reflexively imagines tabloid headlines: ‘NEIGHBOURS FROM HELL’; ‘DISCO INFERNO!’; ‘Uncle of Kid Killer was Peeping Tom As a Teen – To His Own Stepmum!’ Tom is a complicated hack: at times he has to play-act the sophistication his colleagues seem to possess naturally, and some mornings he has blaring intrusive thoughts in editorial meetings ...”

“... The main business​ of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more or less deserving suitor. During this period, she will encounter many examples of successful and unsuccessful marriage, but these are necessarily incidental to her concerns ...”

“... his life took place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English ...”

“... penny when no copies went off – has often been told. In 1861, two years after its appearance, a young Celtic scholar called Whitley Stokes fished several copies out of the bargain box and gave some to friends, including Monckton Milnes, Richard Burton and D.G. Rossetti. Ruskin and Burne-Jones discovered it; Meredith was bowled over by it. By the century’s ...”

“... bed. Like Mr Cochrane in the London theatre at a later date, she made her profession suitable for young ladies and thus solved two problems, one for the profession and one for the young ladies. The professional problem was to attract recruits whose personal background guaranteed reasonable standards of hygiene and ...”

“... or Vindaloo. Something of the same determinedly trivial desire to prove himself is revealed in Edward Wilson’s Naturalist. The great myrmecologist’s memoir is filled with references to scaling the highest mountains, collecting the most species, and above all to standing where no (white) man had ever stood before, finding organisms hitherto ‘unknown ...”

“... Ricketts were among the illustrators who often delighted and sometimes shocked public opinion; the young Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde among the best-known of the writers. And with the often splendid Yellow Book, first published in 1894, the firm achieved real notoriety and inspired innumerable parodies, comic verses and quips. Norman Gale, a long since ...”

“... Council. It seems that it is a good moment to kill off all sorts of things. While thousands of young men are exposed unnecessarily to violence, and to its infliction – supposedly on our behalf, more probably to satisfy the vanity of a few unjust men and women, who want to go on running this country for a bit – a whole generation of ...”

“... of it might have been helpful. ‘Amy Foster’, the most desolate of his stories, is about a young man from Eastern Europe, shipwrecked off the English coast on his way to America, who ends up as the husband of the affectionate but inarticulate Amy Foster. The man remains a foreigner, never learns the language, and even after he and Amy have a child ...”

“... into the zeal of Protestant reformers, but also running through it is the resentful voice of a young nobleman who got caught and who simply cannot believe that a Howard could ever be in the wrong. ‘London, hast thow accused me’ has an incredulous stress on the words ‘me’ and ‘thou’: how could you, you idolatrous, lecherous commoners, blame me ...”

“... the book as a fantasy of incestuous marriage. Alanna is pregnant by a husband who has left her; Edward is a poet immobilised after an accident. As her pregnancy progresses, Alanna’s lyricism becomes feverish; ‘Edward, Rock in an ocean of delirium, succour me! Secure me with your stark arms, male hard arms, which bend ...”