“... 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 ...”

“... wretched, delightful; and always compelling, always surprising. Both as a child and later as a young man, Achak comes forcefully across as a person of considerable charm, intelligence, wit and resilience; he only very rarely sounds a little too like Dave Eggers. Two stories unfold simultaneously in What Is the What. It begins, vividly and against ...”

“... shtetl Jew endeavouring simply to subsist’.The marriage became even more strained after Meir met David Remez, director of the public works office of the Histadrut, who helped her get a job at the Women Workers’ Council in Tel Aviv. She took the children to live there, leaving Morris in Jerusalem. Meir’s affair with Remez lasted for two decades, until his ...”

“... glade.’In the next room an opera singer began performing scales. I assumed, when I married so young, that I would eventually have a weird baby – albeit one whose eyes were the correct distance apart and whose legs were neither bowed nor knock-kneed. I thought perhaps the baby would have a lovely name and no trouble filling out forms at the dentist and ...”

“... to read about the way AI is affecting other people’s work. A dramatic recent case involved the young podcaster Zhong Shu (real name Zhuge Yiyang). When Christopher Nolan came to China to promote The Odyssey, Zhong Shu was one of the people invited to interview him. Their conversation was a big success; Western commentators complained that ‘Nolan had to ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and ...”