“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on Thackeray by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated handbagging. Crucially, when ...”

“... political. In 1997, the markets were still bound to be suspicious of the purported prudence of young Brown, let alone the infant Balls, and much readier to trust Steady Eddie. Here, it might be thought, Brown was going for a short-term political gain – buying confidence by hiding behind the Bank. But he was no more ready than Clarke to surrender his own ...”

“... are more likely to find it in Brooklyn or Queens, and the banker’s island paradise that young people leave behind is decidedly less vital without them. Bender makes a strong claim for the role of creative intellectuals in New York’s political culture in his six central chapters. An ambitious essay on ‘Modernist Aesthetics and Urban ...”

“... version of the Brownshirts, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, a mass movement of young people who travel around harassing government opponents. Two years ago, reportedly on a day selected by astrologers, Than Shwe moved the seat of government from Rangoon to Naypyidaw, a small town in the jungle heart of the country, installing the generals ...”

“... from one of the most celebrated books, Atalanta Fugiens, composed in 1617 by the German alchemist Michael Maier. An engraving entitled Nutrix ejus terra est (‘the Earth is its nurse,’ a line from the Emerald Tablet) depicts the Earth as a woman with the globe as her body, nursing a child, while at her feet a she-wolf suckles Romulus and Remus, and baby ...”

“... a substitute for empire, and that was sufficient; likewise his colleagues. As the journalist Hugo Young put it, ‘the deep, existential meaning, for Britain, of getting into “Europe” was not considered.’ No serious thought was given to the implications of accession. In his judgment, ‘ministers did not lie, but they avoided telling the full ...”

“... Finish Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea, an account of the time he spent at Aldeburgh as a young man. It’s uncritical of the regime, adulatory of Britten and Imogen Holst, though more muted about Pears. The fact is Aldeburgh was a court, and whether the ruler is Henry VIII or Benjamin Britten all courts are the same, with the courtiers anxious to ...”

“... frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing’. But his reputation has remained tinged with an almost religious aura. Even his daughter recognises why he might have been described as ‘an ascetic divine’, who ‘with his lean ...”

“... in 19th-century German universities. It had few practical uses, and at a time when all the bright young scientists in Germany were turning to hard-nosed experimental and physiological approaches, it was dismissed as a merely ‘descriptive’ discipline. But even description wasn’t easy. Source materials were scarce, hard to handle, hard or impossible to ...”

“... else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her ...”

“... hung an academic gown in the window as a makeshift flag of mourning. Their father, Milman Parry, a young classicist at Harvard, was in Goražde, 120 miles from Dubrovnik. He had come to Yugoslavia to record local folk singers as evidence to support his theory that ‘the Iliad and the Odyssey are composed in a traditional style, and are composed ...”

“... to have found new evidence which proves, amongst other things, the religious affiliations of the young Shakespeare. Honigmann has ventured into the black hole of Shakespeare biography, the years between his marriage in 1582 and the first mention of his success on the London stage in 1592. These years have provided biographers in the past with a convenient ...”

“... It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his love of words. If he found words fascinating – their sounds, their peculiar symmetries and associations, their chimes, rhymes, assonances and quiddities – then he was likely to prove the real thing ...”