“... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...”

“... in love as planned, Cecily won’t let him read it: ‘Oh no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.’ Cecily’s diary is a ruse just like her modesty. It’s a cover for her unladylike ambitions – to ...”

“... travelling west across the great plains towards the Rockies; unbeknown to most of them, a young and beautiful heiress kidnapped from a town in Louisiana has been secreted in their wagon-train, hidden in what Cooper calls a ‘pavilion’; the other members of the clan have been told the ‘pavilion’ houses some sort of beast they mustn’t go ...”

“... aristocratic, always about the business of raising himself and hiding himself, and, from a young age, brilliantly observing Britain from the top of his nose and the summit of Parnassus. From Blackpool in 1942: The best thing about this place is the potted shrimps one can buy for succour between performances! Not really a holiday attraction, of ...”

“... grew up speaking Chope and Ronga, and learned Portuguese at a Catholic mission school. She married young, had two children, then left her husband in her mid-twenties. At university, she studied linguistics but soon quit to dedicate herself to her writing. In the 1980s, she became a member of Frelimo, the Marxist-Leninist movement which had achieved ...”

“... was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the death of his young wife and infant daughter in an automobile accident in 1972; the death of his eldest son from brain cancer in 2015; the crack addiction and wastrelsy of his surviving son in the years that followed. Broadcasting a socially distanced campaign from his ...”

“... the successors to the Communist Party, which had been dissolved in 1991. By that time, a dapper young man, Gianfranco Fini, had replaced Almirante as leader of the MSI. Fini promised to rejuvenate ‘fascism for the year 2000’, which didn’t stop Berlusconi from endorsing him when he ran for mayor of Rome in 1993. This was the first and, in ...”

“... and friendship loyalties, and wholly negative. The case always cited was that of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who denounced his own father during collectivisation, whose example was recommended to generations of Soviet children.*In the course of my research on Soviet history, I became interested in Stalin’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early ...”

“... non-SF novel, The Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in the late 1940s and depicting a young doctor’s wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins ...”

“... directing our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment.’ As a young socialist organiser in Turin, Gramsci had enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik Revolution. After 1926, imprisoned by the fascists, he turned his attention to figuring out why the revolutions that almost happened across Europe in the 1910s and 1920s had ...”

“... and he opened a showroom in South Kensington to display his rugs and furniture. Rab Butler, then a young MP, and his wife, Sydney Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, commissioned him to design their dining room. Interior design led to a growing circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White ...”

“... was never dealt with directly. In three years, there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in ...”

“... found it hard to decide whether he was a whimsical idealist or a provocateur. Only Minna, a young German employed there as a hostess, signed his petition urging the French government to take a stand on wildlife protection. The clientele assumed she had fallen in love with him. Morel then took to the bush and launched a vigilante campaign involving ...”

“... It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”