“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was thrilling, she told Juliano in the documentary he made about her, Arna’s Children, to be a young woman ‘driving people from place to place, and nobody could stop you’. She would remain a Palmachnik – tough-talking, sometimes arrogant, always brutally direct – and she passed the style on to Juliano. The keffiyeh she wore in Jenin, which ...”

“... of defeat.But Lucas does hear something just before he dies. Across the empty water of the bay a young boy and his father are fishing from a boat anchored near the shore. The young boy is trailing a line from the stern of the small boat and their voices carry clearly across the surface of the waters. As Lucas dies, there ...”

“... system safer, the answer again is that we don’t really know. As the financial historian David Marsh observed, the only way you can properly test a firewall is by having a fire. I think the ring-fence is an opportunity missed. That goes for a lot of the small complicated rules designed to make banks and the financial system safer. Bankers complain ...”

“... the novelist, Joan Acocella speaks with some reverence of Cath-er’s ‘Duse revelation’: the young writer’s precocious verdict, having seen both actresses perform onstage in the 1890s, that Duse was the superior artist because of the classical restraint she invariably brought to her roles. Bernhardt ‘expressed’ tragic emotion, Cather wrote in a ...”

“... fired.) ‘In my whole life,’ he confided to Einstein, ‘I have never felt so Jewish as now.’ Young Fritz, too, came to feel for the first time that he was not ‘Aryan’, a word that had had little resonance before. He knew nothing of his Jewish origins until his father’s severe lecture after he directed an anti-semitic remark at his sister. Then the ...”

“... was also not one of much scientific interest except to one or two mavericks. One of them was a young American physicist called James Hansen, whose 1967 PhD thesis studied Venus and came to the conclusion that it was the greenhouse effect which made the planet so warm – 400ºC on the surface, hot enough to melt lead. A probe later the same year showed ...”

“... and could watch the ships going up and down. When I was 12 or 13 they were saying: “What’s young Billy going to do when he leaves school?” He wasn’t going to be a plumber. He was going to sea, wasn’t he?’It wasn’t an easy way to make a living. Crews worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off on the journey to and from the Icelandic fishing ...”

“... resources – oil, gas, diamonds, and copper flogged off at dirt-cheap prices to a few incredulous young bankers – a criminal act? Glenny calls it ‘quite simply, the grandest larceny in history’. The sell-off certainly gave a huge boost to organised crime. The billionaire oligarchs Yeltsin created were not themselves syndicate gangsters; their own ...”

“... chieftains, brought to London to ratify a colonial treaty, were taken to a performance in 1710. David Garrick, reviving the play in the 1740s, played Macbeth in the modern red coat of a Georgian general, so that he looked quite like the Duke of Cumberland, known after his treatment of prisoners taken at Culloden as the Butcher of the Scots. The play only ...”

“... he would ostentatiously wear his convict’s uniform once a year. In 1961, 90 years after Stead, a young man who took him as his hero was appointed editor of his old paper, the Northern Echo. At 33, Harold Evans wasn’t quite as precocious as his predecessor, but he came from a world in some ways closer to Stead’s than to England today. In the engaging ...”

“... for even partial success. John Ross was to look for a northwest passage through Baffin Bay; David Buchan was to head north past Spitsbergen, with luck into the open polar sea and out the Bering Strait into the Pacific. On 29 August, Ross entered Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island. If only he’d known it, he’d found the way into the northwest ...”

“... York put on a solo exhibition of his work, and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will become precious ...”

“... resituates their story in that strange and vanished world which, for three generations of young Britons, revolved around the dance hall. Never before the period 1918-60, Nott writes, had ‘so many people, from so many sections of society, danced as much as they did in these decades … Dancing moved from a craze to a habit, cementing itself as part ...”