“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still resolute that the allied cause was ...”

“... led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep going. Almost immediately afterwards, Tawney himself was shot through the chest and abdomen and lay for 24 hours in no-man’s-land before being rescued. Although he lived with pain for the rest of his ...”

“... of One’s Own, ‘formidable yet humble with her great forehead and her shabby dress’. As a young woman she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady ...”

“... associate with Sydney Kentridge and they are likely to say the Steve Biko inquest. Biko was the young leader of the Black Consciousness movement who in 1977 was tortured and beaten to death over a period of days by members of the South African security police who then, with the connivance of police doctors, lied their way through the inquest conducted by ...”

“... at, as in the school match where Ranji is sneakily (but legally) caught out of his crease by the young M.K. Gandhi (‘the very one who is presently causing us so much trouble!’). And some nagging doubts about Ranji find lodging here: about his fondness for practical jokes, which Auden on Iago is adduced to help us see as ‘slightly sinister’; about his ...”

“... an uncle who had had a bad time in the trenches settled for a career as a big-time embezzler. Young Eric quickly developed his own powers as a con-man, though he had no need to use them to seriously illegal ends. R.M. Ballantyne was his first literary love; a later one was Newth’s Inorganic Chemistry. He made a very ambitious wireless, and carried off a ...”

“... good. Wolff reflects on the spiritual link (as the late 18th century probably saw it) between a young genius and a revered master, and sets the tone of Lang’s Festschrift with some cogent remarks on the diplomat and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the ...”

“... the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar composition and line, while he praised painters like ...”

“... with his thin paw & swiftly absorbing 3 or 4 large lumps of cake in succession. At home he looks young and rompish at the meeting, at Hunts meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow ...”

“... culture always recognised, it was the right of the strong over the weak. In recent years radical young Maoris and Pakeha liberals have tended to join in an alliance the justice of whose case is seldom challenged, perhaps because in practical terms it constitutes no threat. Ihimaera’s novel can be read in large part as a restatement of that case, which goes ...”

“... Disputes over her dowry enabled the less and less enthusiastic Henry VII to stall, while the young dowager princess was kept a virtual prisoner in Durham House in London. Mourning for her mother, desperately short of cash, and smarting under the humiliations of her sudden fall from favour, Catherine’s health deteriorated and her menstrual cycle became ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... to cast their votes, without an agbero in sight. The polling officer and his assistant were both young. At the end of the exercise, which took longer than it should have because there was only one inkpad, the polling officer held up each ballot paper in turn for all to see as he tallied the votes. There was a small fracas over the number of voided ...”

“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... families with investments, while at the same time inflating housing costs to levels that most young people struggle with.The book shows that many of the families which maintain their status in the wealth elite over decades can rely not just on one generation of financial support but on two. Rich grandparents are as useful as rich parents. This is hardly ...”