“... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...”

“... not convinced.’ There were also mutterings about an excessive ‘fondness for the society of young women’, and allegations that he had foresaken Oxfordian conservatism and turned ‘sharply to the left’. Just before leaving for his curative sea voyage Collingwood had submitted his Autobiography to the Oxford University Press. He had always got on ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his ...”

“... activists weren’t the only ones who were interested in this development: seated among us was a young woman who had already been seen at the pre-trial proceedings. She didn’t chat with anybody, didn’t identify herself, and was widely assumed by reporters to be from the CIA. I approached her one afternoon and casually asked where she was from. She ...”

“... a habit of dropping his trousers and removing his clothes when provoked and, famously, peeing on David O. Selznick’s carpet (in the middle of a meeting about a film version of A Doll’s House). He was articulate and rude to journalists, which also generated copy. ‘Booze, broads, all true,’ he told hacks. ‘Make up some more if you want to.’ Mitchum ...”

“... was made into a film by Steven Spielberg. In Spielberg’s AI, scientists build a humanoid robot, David, who is programmed to love. David expresses his love to a woman, Monica, who has adopted him as her child. Current experience suggests that the pressing issue raised by the film is not the potential reality of a robot who ...”

“... racecourse and the music halls. The diminutive Harry Relph began his career in blackface, as ‘Young Tichborne, the Claimant’s Bootlace’, soon to be abbreviated and immortalised as Little Tich, whence ‘tich’ and ‘tichy’ – a delicious way to remember the gargantuan Claimant. Those who took a class-based view of things were bewildered and ...”

“... boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago Freedom Movement and the ...”

“... the literary establishment’s disdain stung, however. In a fine irony, he is now little read by young people – to whom he must seem hopelessly old-fashioned – but academics take him quite seriously, producing a regular stream of articles and monographs.In another irony, those of us who grew up reading him or seeing film versions of his tales often ...”

“... the elect separated out from the reprobate? Even ‘Calvinism’ was ticklish. As David Hall points out, not all Calvinists shared the same eschatology, disagreeing about what happened to souls after death.The question of whether to award the capital ‘P’ or not remains a subject of contention among historians. For Hall, a history professor ...”

“... according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd … He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to ...”

“... totalitarianism than with the tribal collective. In place of societies where elders compromised, young rulers now govern with the conviction of revolutionaries. Qatar’s emir, Tamim Al Thani, is 37. Prince Mohammad, who has day-to-day control of the kingdom, is 32. Across the peninsula, the majlis, the tribal equivalent of a fractious town-hall meeting, has ...”

“... weed. A distant cousin who was also at the party made a beeline for her, or for her stash (the two young women hadn’t spoken before). She shared it and left what remained when she went home. Somehow news of this encounter reached her grandparents, giving them the impression that she was a drug dealer. She reassured them as best she could – but when she ...”

“... political marginalisation weakened traditionalist leaders and the established clergy. Poor, urban young Shia – living in what became known as the ‘belt of misery’ around Beirut – channelled their militancy through leftist activism, rebelling against the oppressive and corrupt Lebanese state. Then a charismatic Iranian cleric of Lebanese origin, Musa ...”