“... had sequestered him. But the rebels’ hope lay in the 14-year-old king himself, still too young to be blamed for the misrule and corruption that surrounded him. Richard met with Tyler and his supporters at Smithfield and conceded to all their demands, following a risky plan hatched by his defenders. His ‘fair words’ counted for nothing: the ...”

“... but the harm and suffering that one inflicts upon oneself.’ The narrator centres her lecture on Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, in which a repressed piano teacher, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), is pursued by a ‘cocky and dashing student’. She proposes a sadomasochistic scenario, is rejected as ‘repugnant’ and then stabs herself in her ...”

“... Buchs, on the Swiss-Austrian frontier,’ he writes:We were invaded by six or seven very young Nazi officials, who took stock of our money and pored over our passports … I was bringing with me for a friend two English sporting guns, and these caused much speculation among the Nazi officials, who wanted to know the military value of such guns. I ...”

“... all that clever-clever experimental Nabokovian crap he thought of his son as writing. And when young the poncey smartarse was a leftie (by his father’s standards, anyway), and would go on about it. But one is still left envying aspects of Martin’s relation with his father, Kingsley buying his early post-pubescent sons a gross of condoms or doing his ...”

“... Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind), Poppy Kirk (a Schiaparelli model and prominent diplomat’s wife) and many others in ...”

“... through the advantages of ‘torture-lite’ in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff, biographer of Isaiah Berlin and professor of human rights, exhorted Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and offered his own suggestions for ‘permissible duress’. Even the New Yorker, fastidiously aloof from Beltway schemers during ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the railways. For a minority, the enthusiasts, almost exclusively men (and not, on the whole, young men), the railways are a consuming, fanatical interest. No detail, past or present, is too minor or banal to escape celebration, classification, re-enactment, preservation and restoration. The majority, though, speak of the railways in the utilitarian terms ...”

“... of British intellectuals who have thought themselves above expressing national pride. A young academic (in his mid-thirties), he belongs to a generation which has become alert to the political importance of patriotism and which takes Britain’s European future pretty much for granted. His enjoyable tour through the past sixty years stops at the ...”

“... He was certainly a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Yet in a sense he was fortunate. He was too young to have become a Red Guard, which might have damaged his later political career, and he was neither killed nor morally destroyed before he was rusticated. There were worse fates: his siblings were incarcerated and one of his sisters killed herself.The fable ...”

“... Bosnia and Kosovo than the stations of his own bitter journey to the final betrayal: there was the young boy, all but orphaned, placing tins of burning pitch in the stubble, waiting for the sound of aircraft; then the elderly farmer, cowering in his house under Croatian artillery fire, days after the Serbs had surrendered; and a few years later, the defeated ...”

“... the white-walled earth kiln ran into technical difficulties with her presentation. Karen Russo, a young Israeli artist, had developed a fascination with William Lyttle, the so-called ‘Mole Man’ of Hackney. Lyttle, talked up by estate agents promoting the auction of the ruined shell of his former house, a gothic property wedged like a ghost ship in the ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... opposition to the sultan’s tyranny had become widespread by the turn of the century among the young of all ethnic groups, not least Turks themselves. In 1908 rumours of an impending Russo-British carve-up of the region triggered a military rising in Monastir and Salonika. The revolt spread rapidly, and within a couple of weeks had become ...”

“... 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 ...”