“... like Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who from safe offices and Ops Rooms sent so many young men to futile and agonising deaths. The Dam Busters was made in 1954, when the myth of Bomber Command’s strategic success was still relatively unscathed by revisionist historians.* Harris is portrayed in it without criticism – indeed, as a kind of wise ...”

“... than battering helplessly on the established centres of power: the Anti-Nazi League drew young enthusiasts from a wide political spectrum. The National Front, in its turn, needed the Anti-Nazi League (or some equivalent). The prospect of a legitimised punch-up was one of the recruiting draws of the NF. The confrontations with the Anti-Nazi League ...”

“... his run, we hardly realised how discouraged we were; and his appeal is warmest and widest with young voters. A large reason for this is his realistic emphasis on the coming catastrophe of planetary climate disruption, an issue on which, thanks to his courage and tenacity, he stands alone among living American politicians. But in other ways too, Sanders ...”

“... and restaurant owners decided to rent closet-size booths to concessionaires who hired attractive young women to check the hats. Everyone came out ahead (except for the women behind the counters, who had to battle for the tips they then had to hand over to their bosses). The story of the hat-check girl, borrowed in part from an A.J. Liebling New Yorker ...”

“... coupling in Ulysses when he paired the Jewish commercial traveller Leopold Bloom with the young artist Stephen Dedalus, whose namesake is the Cretan master who designed that Iliad dancefloor.) Critics have often noted the Odyssey’s almost obsessive attention to luxury artefacts and crafted objects – a metapoetic nod to its own artistry – but ...”

“... asked: ‘What are you up to at Eishken?’ ‘Probably drinking too much,’ replied one of the young bloods. Nicolson knows that for well-off people to own parts of the Highlands is invidious. At the start of his book he retails the remarks of a man who came up to him in Macleod’s Bar in Tarbert, on Harris, and said: ‘Well, you’re a sackful a shite ...”

“... St Stephen’s of University College Dublin, was rejecting ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ by a young troublemaker called James Joyce. He wasn’t turned down by everyone: his description of the Irish Homestead as ‘the pigs’ paper’ may have been a way of covering his blushes – early versions of three Dubliners stories appeared there, one of them ...”

“... book is a revised doctoral dissertation which views the Webbs with Webb-like detachment: Young’s account is longer but also slighter – an affectionate (if faintly equivocal) survey by an Old Dartingtonian, who knew both Elmhirsts well, and is himself a trustee of the school. As Britain explains, the Fabians have usually been depicted as ...”

“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... on both sides of the Atlantic. Dressed in a carefully chosen series of gowns – by Deirdre David’s report, the wardrobe consisted of black or red velvet for the tragedies, white or pastel satin for the comedies, and dark green or blue brocade for the history plays – and with no props other than a large reading desk, some piled-up books and a pair ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... manageable size. Beaumarchais was a manic character, of the sort who would now be diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder or something similar, and placed on medication designed to ensure a long life of obscure mediocrity. When the first performance of The Barber of Seville unexpectedly bombed in 1775, he rewrote the play in less than 48 ...”

“... One evening in December 1975 David Plante called on his friend, the novelist Jean Rhys, who was staying in a hotel in South Kensington: ‘a big dreary hotel’, she said, ‘filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth’. She was sitting in what the receptionist called ‘the pink lounge’, wearing a pink hat ...”

“... stage of finance and diplomacy. His next move was an assault on the Paris stage, which ambitious young men regularly used as a route to fame and fortune. Eugénie was respectfully received in 1767. It was, like Les Deux Amis (1770), an earnest drame bourgeois, written to show that middle-class hearts, too, could bleed. Beaumarchais disagreed with Rousseau ...”

“... and 1950s. Contemplating the slender yield of bohemian anecdotes from his time as a student and young lecturer at University College Dublin, he wisely decided to leave the field to Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails. The closest thing he could write to a memoir of those years, he realised, would be a book on Eliot, the writer whose work had left the ...”