“... paintings, but Robb’s book provides a positive interpretation of the same theme, a study of the young rebel in art and life, whose paintings and street brawls are described in the same vivid style. He was the ‘first modern painter’, Robb tells us, and the ‘peculiar personal honesty’ of his art ‘has more to do with Cézanne than with the painters ...”

“... her nipples showing through her tunic’ – but she evidently doesn’t reciprocate. They’re young: ‘He wouldn’t be one of those boys who turned up at a girl’s house unannounced.’ He’s tall: when he stands up after putting her suitcase down, he ‘knocked his head against the bald light bulb’. He has recently arrived in England; the fittings ...”

“... painted in 1601, has been hung next to The Taking of Christ from 1602.) This, after all, was the young Lombard’s calling card when Roman patrons led by Cardinal del Monte began commissioning Caravaggio in the mid-1590s: an unprecedented technical prowess, allowing him to deliver descriptions of physicality so acute and luscious that they left words ...”

“... the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer Anthony Hunt and the young Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, who were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of ...”

“... of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it is the Labour Party, and specifically its left wing, which suffers most severely from myths about a golden past now lost in the mists of time. Even quite well-read Labour politicians are prone to the belief that This Great Movement of ...”

“... large,’ she wrote to one of her ‘pansy’ friends. Lady Q was, of course, her sister Diana, a young woman with a small child and a not-yet-weaned baby. Nancy went in person to the Home Office to inform Gladwyn Jebb, then Under-Secretary of State, that she considered Lady Mosley to be ‘dangerous’. It is a wonder that, while she was about it, she did ...”

“... played her friends off against each other, telling one person what another had done for her (‘David brought me a bottle of champagne and kept his taxi waiting’), I now see as the neediness of a greedy child who didn’t have enough childhood and who was longing for her own father to love her. (Janet re-met her father at the age of 16 on a self-arranged ...”

“... if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is inflated out of all proportion, that facts buttressing the case are carefully selected, and all the evidence ...”

“... Oxford from 1981 to 1989, his career has been all of a piece. The scholar, the actor, the dashing young subaltern and the Union debater, have all gone into the making of this extremely elegant and rather grand figure. In teaching, research and administration his career is a testament to the rise of a new professionalism in the Universities since 1945. But ...”

“... of the ‘English spirit’ and would therefore counteract the notion that ‘the minds of young women are becoming unEnglish.’ At Oxford there was little support for English studies, but in 1873 English was included in the examinations for a Pass Degree. After a public campaign during the 1880s, a final Honours School of English Language and ...”

“... though he found Lindbergh ‘as nice as can be’. He described him as ‘like a bright, young chauffeur’. Ludovic Kennedy draws attention to a disagreeable side of Lindbergh’s character: a taste for aggressive practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off at dawn on 20 May 1927 for his historic flight across ...”

“... implied between free societies and the free association of ideas. Lost Time describes a group of young people who enjoy certain advantages of the Arnoldian (no relation) training of mind: they have been brought up to read novels and casually to drop names in conversation. Allusions to literature proliferate, and the reader is expected to take as much ...”

“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

“... Peretz arrived in one such development town, Sderot, a few miles away from the Gaza Strip, as a young child from the town of Bojad in Morocco, where he was born Armand Peretz in 1952. Until 1983, when he was elected head of the local council, his story was fairly typical: he worked as an unskilled labourer in a nearby kibbutz, served in the army and was ...”

“... stagecraft and of her dialogue diction from Shakespeare, a dramatic ancestry that was audible in David Buxton’s 1978 production of The Rover at Colchester. Ms Goreau’s feminist dogma rests, however, on the manifestly false assumption, which is at the same time bitterly insulting to women, that no woman possesses imagination enough to identify herself ...”