“... into popular use through officialdom – “safari” reports were a regular part of a young Assistant Commissioner’s paperwork – so that by 1905 or so it was colloquial in tiny Nairobi but unknown in London.’ The word became world-famous after 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt, relinquishing his Presidency, decided to hunt in East Africa and put his ...”

“... which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician ...”

“... eccentric but deeply experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... President of Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, Charles Gavan ...”

“... in what a standard account calls one of the most romantic episodes in the history of medicine, the young man was taken from the woods to New York, where for decades his doctor could watch exactly what went on in his stomach when he ate. Some of this is real ‘north face of the Eiger’ stuff. Jesse Lazear let a mosquito bite a yellow-fever victim and then ...”

“... authored by distinguished-looking foreign gentlemen – Nabokov, Calvino – rather than a scruffy young lady in a combat jacket with a curly Jimi Hendrix crop. But the world caught up with her in the 1970s with the spread of women’s liberation and the founding in Britain of the feminist Virago Press. Carter was one of the first authors Virago recruited to ...”

“... this by ensuring that the city’s first secretary was always an Azerbaijani.When he was young, most of his friends and neighbours were Armenian, as were the other boys in his football team. The city had three high schools, all close together: Armenian, Russian and Azerbaijani. He went to the Azerbaijani school, but students from all three would ...”

“... you had sex with a girl or with a boy. The problem is to know if the partner was rich or poor, young or old, slave or free, married or not. Of course, Artemidorus takes into account the question of the sexual act, but he sees it only from the point of view of the male. The only act he knows or recognises as sexual is penetration. Penetration is for him not ...”

“... era, has not succeeded. We who are older have now some reason for optimism, for a belief that the young have not had their spirit broken nor their minds unhinged by coming of age in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Susan Faludi discovered her topic, as she tells us in her prefatory Acknowledgments, when she began work on a ‘magazine story on the Harvard-Yale “man ...”

“... David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded ...”

“... unlikely subjects. A taste for the primitive, the botched and hobbled. A sentimental attachment to young orphans and drowned sailors. Hayley had a considerable, if transitory reputation, both as verse-maker and biographer (Milton, Cowper). His poetry might have been bad enough for him to have been offered the Laureateship, but the ‘Lives’ which he produced ...”

“... Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often ...”

“... poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused. When we rerun the history in our minds, wishing to find a way to make it all happen differently, it is hard to know whether, for the sake of Keats and ...”

“... me to lunch with the Sillitoes, around whose table were some visiting Russian literary types, and Robert Graves. I was even more silent than usual, having a marked taste for older, old men actually, and being quite overwhelmed by Graves’s grey curls and the beauty of his pronounced Roman nose, as well as his grave pronouncements about art and life, none of ...”