“... 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 ...”

“... race, rallying to Britannia in her hour of need. What kind of men were they? Predominantly single, young, eager, and without technical skills. Most were channelled into the Infantry, where they could be taught the rudiments of trench warfare in a few weeks. A few of them, however, already possessed the most crucial skill of such a war: the ability to ...”

“... precision astronomy. Newton never travelled abroad, but Halley was a sailing scientist from a very young age. His father sent him up to Oxford with state-of-the-art astronomical instruments, and subsidised his early research with an allowance – in current values – of £100,000 a year. But before he took his degree Halley’s influential friends had already ...”

“... Other myths originated in Lloyd George’s tendency, especially when talking to an attractive young woman, to dramatise or improve on incidents in his past. He seems to have thought a spiritual crisis appropriate for a serious Welsh boy, especially for one who was later to exploit Nonconformist enthusiasm when himself an agnostic. He therefore gave ...”

“... and all mediated through her father. First came the moral ethic of judgmental Methodism. Young Margaret was sent to Sunday school in the morning before accompanying her parents to chapel; and was then expected to attend Sunday school again in the afternoon, though let off the evening service. Then there was the economic ethic of the family grocery ...”

“... her helpful analysis of Sloane’s library, Wilkins’s work was one of the first folios which the young Hans Sloane purchased when he reached London as an ambitious apothecary in the early 1680s. Decades later, various drafts of his will underlined the high religious purpose he reckoned such collections should discharge, especially ‘the manifestation of the ...”

“... still dead when it’s over.’ He’d had enough. Even now I think of that final scene in David Lean’s old film when Zhivago’s heart is described as ‘paper thin’. He thinks he sees Lara turning a corner in Moscow. He struggles to get off the bus, loosens his tie, finally makes it to the sidewalk where, after two steps, he drops dead. Dead ...”

“... offices were full of people at the very edge of their tolerance. Families were cracking with it, young folk were losing their way, former workers were losing the place. I watched the woman at the desk next to mine offering grown men ‘positions’ in something called the Job Club, where they could learn how to fill in an application form or make a telephone ...”

“... way: blank, rheumy-eyed, sick as the day was long. An unmerry child with St Vitus’ Dance, the young Warhol lay twitching in his bed under a blanket of fan magazines, the source of all his imaginary friendships – with Errol Flynn and Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to ...”

“... God’s strength made perfect in human weakness: the Bible story of Gideon, or of the shepherd boy David. For it was the religious anxieties and unanswered questions of this insignificant monk, not the great powers of the world against which elaborate diplomatic, legal and military defences had been erected, which brought ruin to the Pope, to the Church as it ...”

“... Parthenon. It isn’t clear that the journey to Arezzo was made by many British artists. But the young Edgar Degas went there in the summer of the very year that Layard’s article appeared. Soon afterwards, Degas began his large canvas (now in the Musée d’Orsay) of Semiramis Directing the Building of Babylon. The gracious but rigid pose of the Queen and ...”