“... voice, and Harrisson was at the other end, doing exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household ...”

“... the Great War, in which he served with distinction as an artillery officer. He fell in love with a young secretary called Anny Berthal, could not afford to marry, and after the war moved from one university to another, seeking more lucrative posts and a nurturing climate for his research. In 1921, a married man, he settled in Zurich for six years. These were ...”

“... and pimps, organised the great Purity Demonstration in Hyde Park, attended by van-loads of young girls dressed in white, which promoted the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Afterwards, in 1887, he persuaded the police to use their powers under this Act to close brothels in Tower Hamlets. In the words of Charrington’s admiring biographer, ‘our ...”

“... had a dozen illegitimate sons and one legitimate one, who was drowned with most of the court’s young bloods in a wreck Orderic describes brilliantly). The Normans’ genius lay in targeting the richest and most prestigious corporations in the 11th-century bull-market, then squeezing them for all they were worth and more. They knew how to use the ...”

“... explaining the construction of the world in his major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Any young philosopher setting out to establish a career would be well advised to think twice before making a committed intellectual investment in the symbol. This is more obvious now than it would have been in the first quarter of the 20th century, when Cassirer was ...”

“... detail, the fairies, along with the other inhabitants of Fairyland – in the mid-19th century Michael Aislabie Denham listed more than 150 species, ‘hobbits’ included – gave the medieval Church more of a headache than has been admitted. The main problem, we might say nowadays, was that they were ‘inadequately theorised’. What were fairies? Where ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... a Christian Sunday school. They would have retained at least the exciting bits, such as when the young hero David (destined to be the second king of the united kingdom of Judah and Israel) slew the mighty Philistine warrior Goliath, using only his skill with a sling and a few pebbles. These stories and the corpus of literature in which they are embedded have ...”

“... a radical disjuncture but a return to the perfection of the primitive church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert ...”

“... of copies were printed and distributed to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the ...”

“... with photographs of the ‘passionate attitudes’ that Charcot had elicited from his young female patients. The debt to Freud ran deeper still: without free association there was no automatic writing, which Breton explored with Philippe Soupault as early as 1920 in Les Champs magnétiques, and both the interpretation of dreams and the analysis of ...”

“... boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago Freedom Movement and the ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by Mitchum himself ...”

“... 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 ...”