“... designed by his best modellers. In this classicised allegory of colonial success, Hope, a young woman in flowing robes, reaches out to Peace with her olive branch, Art with her palette, and Labour, with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. A ship in the background shows the arrival of the colonists while a horn of plenty spills its contents onto the ...”

“... from dry yellow vitriol ground up with saltpetre.In the 17th century, the corpuscular theories of Robert Boyle and others overtook alchemy, and a more mechanical philosophy made the magical universe redundant. The shift was, however, gradual. In the 1670s George Starkey, tutor to the young Boyle, published commentaries on ...”

“... banknote falls from a man’s pocket. The camera shows Gandhi’s face on the note. A young girl picks the money up, and asks her mother what she should do with it. Her mother says she can get herself chocolate, buy a doll or give it back. The girl hands the note back to the man who dropped it. Against a background of sentimental music, a voice ...”

“... tried to suppress the book and to buy up copies from bookshops. It’s almost a relief to turn to Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office until his vehement opposition to appeasement led Chamberlain to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, who proposed a different enemy: Prussia and Prussianism. He told Lord Halifax that the war ...”

“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... allowed in old age to use the glasses which had been denied him earlier as ‘unsuitable for a young man’; and in Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ...”

“... to make one of Murray’s central subjects. One harsh poem in Conscious and Verbal describes a young Murray desperately embarrassed in Sydney, ‘feeling abashed by proper people’: the feeling, like the poem, Murray calls ‘Big Shame’. Sometimes I wish he were more easily embarrassed by his own phrases, and less so by the life against which they ...”

“... to be politicians as poets, or indeed judges or bishops, lords or commoners, men of influence or young unknowns; and any single individual might fulfil more than one of these roles. Arnold’s social experience was certainly not confined to the society of other intellectuals, still less of other ‘educationists’: one of the works of reference most ...”

“... of piety otherwise displayed. (Frame Analysis) Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone: Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in their legislative offices ... What ...”

“... that I had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did ...”

“... which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings him a bowl of water so he can dip them in to test. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience ...”

“... field of biology known as parabiosis, which involves experiments in blood transfusion from the young to the old. Asked about this at a New York Times event in 2018, Thiel responded: ‘I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to say. I want to publicly tell you I’m not a vampire.’Is there a guiding philosophy that connects this bewildering range of ...”

“... NoViolet Bulawayo​ intended to write a non-fiction account of the 2017 coup that deposed Robert Mugabe and made Emmerson Mnangagwa, his one-time deputy, the third president of Zimbabwe. But she couldn’t keep up with the changing political situation. There was a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for ...”

“... in 19th-century German universities. It had few practical uses, and at a time when all the bright young scientists in Germany were turning to hard-nosed experimental and physiological approaches, it was dismissed as a merely ‘descriptive’ discipline. But even description wasn’t easy. Source materials were scarce, hard to handle, hard or impossible to ...”