“... structure and life of our family units are changing. Marriage is popular – often contracted at a young age, and often not very durable. But in spite of the present ease of entering and leaving wedlock, 16 per cent of births, 99,000 children a year, are illegitimate. Yet only three and a half thousand of these come on the adoption market. A lot of family life ...”

“... for more traditional school syllabuses or by more conventional behaviour on the part of the young. But all of that is happening on a more modest scale. It could become less modest if there was a real threat to the stability of society – for instance, from an escalation of inner-city rioting. But for the moment the shift has been not from Progress to ...”

“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”

“... friend: The road to Sligo. A spring morning. 1798. Going into battle. Do you remember, James? Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid in their pockets. Everything seemed to find definition that spring – a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The ...”

“... the dispute was not about the Court of Assistants. The conflict concerned the struggle of the ‘young men’ outside the Livery for constitutional and financial benefits, and culminated in the creation of the yeomanry. The Goldsmith Court Minute Book leaves no doubt as to the true nature of the episode. I suggested in my book that in the 1630s the City was ...”

“... politics. But it would have verged on the uncanny to have foreseen such a succession when young John Major first stood as a Conservative candidate for the Larkhill ward of Lambeth in 1964. The experience of living in rented rooms in Cold-harbour Lane, Brixton, after his father’s business had failed was still fresh. The fact of having left school ...”

“... A gap of fifteen years between sections seems to set the mesh of the net too wide.In Seven Up!, Michael Apted chose a group of seven-year-olds and returned to his interview subjects at intervals of seven years. In 20 Sites n Years, a different sort of documentary project, Tom Phillips set out in 1973 to take pictures of twenty London streets on ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”

“... can only say: lasciate ogni speranza (abandon all hope).’ It was about the time that the young Haber decided on an academic career that he had himself baptised. He had already had his application for a Prussian reserve officer’s commission rejected – no Prussian Jew had yet become an officer, apart from in the medical corps – and he was not ...”

“... He also gives an early, sceptical perspective on the Mahler legend as it was gestating among the young people of Vienna. After a predictable assault on the material of the Sixth, he meditates interestingly on the spirit behind the music: The right mood isn’t there, nor the tenderness, the happy introspection, the calm inherent in creation. All these ...”

“... from egotistical doodles by squads of professional taggers and spray-can bandits. I watched a young man directing, with all the panache of a cadet Pasolini, his crew of despoilers, as they whitewashed the bricks for his latest intervention: a naked male slumped on a bench, Minotaur’s head superimposed, a hank of meat dripping from his paw. TIME TO ...”

“... well as on celluloid, he charmed everyone who met him, from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who considered the young diplomat’s exquisite manners and refined intelligence ‘the perfect pattern of an eminent prelate of the Catholic Church’, to D’arcy Osborne, the British government’s representative in Rome during World War Two, who, though often critical of ...”

“... why poets themselves celebrate poets who renounce writing. At university in the 1990s the coolest young poets I knew were reading Rimbaud and Oppen – two very great and very different writers who had in common their abandonment of the art (though Oppen’s was only temporary). Rimbaud stops at twenty or so and starts running guns; Oppen is silent for 25 ...”

“... based in London wrote in December 1966: I was struck by the way the British ambassador to Israel [Michael Hadow] practically encouraged us openly to strike against the Syrians . . . To my knowledge, Hadow moved among various circles in Israel offering encouragement in this direction. Today we are witnessing a confrontation between IPC [the Iraq Petroleum ...”

“... Germany (he still hadn’t seen that the more imminent danger lay with Otho at home), he adopted a young aristocrat to be his successor: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus. Piso was murdered, with Galba, five days later. The adoption of Piso is the first major event in Tacitus’ Histories, which opens with the beginning of the year 69 and originally ...”