“... and ‘Love Is Blue’ – grimly laid down as puberty loomed – don’t count.) Pepper was a child prodigy. Though neglected and unloved (his parents split up and basically dumped him) he got hold of a clarinet and taught himself to play. By the age of 14 he was sitting in on clarinet and sax in jazz clubs all around LA. After a short stint in the Army ...”

“... in the semi-authentic antiquarian bookshops groaned as hustlers with bulging golf carts and child buggies lurched in off the street. ‘We’ve got books. Got ‘em all. Cellar’s full. Sorry.’ Book graveyards are all that remains of Greenwich’s punt at culture. The theatre, in want of a few hundred thousand pounds of Lottery money, has been closed ...”

“... crime as an intuitive revolt against racism. But he was also – in Hilton Als’s words – ‘a child of the bourgeoisie in love with the stars in the gutter’, and the gutter nearly swallowed him up. In 1928, he robbed a couple in Cleveland of four rings worth $5000, and was arrested the next day in a pawnshop. The police forced a confession out of him by ...”

“... I have loved mentally, and some physically.’ Two years after their wedding, the Channons’ only child, Paul, was born, but eighteen months later ‘we broke off conjugal relations, never in our case particularly successful.’ By then Honor was increasingly absent on supposed skiing holidays – one of them in July – and Channon eventually realised that ...”

“... meant that he was put in a class with boys a year older. If you were designing a formula to make a child a target for bullying, you couldn’t do much better. On his first night, Huang’s roommate pulled up his shirt to show him the scars he had accumulated from knife wounds. The newcomer, who stayed at school during the holidays because he had nowhere else ...”

“... dinner in Davos attended by Eric Schmidt from Google; inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee; the boss of Vodafone, Vittori Colao; the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt; the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman; and Fadi Chehadé, the CEO of the body charged with co-ordinating the internet.’ It’s worth dwelling on this, because the position ...”

“... one member in a partnership with producers, retailers and consumers. The consumer is still the child-sorcerer of market democracy, sweet-toothed and capricious, gaining weight by the meal and ready to throw it about: government can’t quite face off against us. Well, not yet – but there’s a strong hint that in Defra’s thinking ‘choice’ is no ...”

“... and his own capacity to achieve it. His destiny was to be a deeply disappointed man, until Lee Harvey Oswald intervened to redeem him. (I am assuming that Johnson had nothing to do with the assassination, as does Caro, who says that in his many years of research he has found nothing to suggest any involvement or foreknowledge on Johnson’s part. You ...”

“... sentence ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’; and the tricycle ride by his sensitive child, Danny, in the vacant hotel, along the vast reaches of the floor, around corners that will lead to a place that is not nice at all. The Steadicam, mounted low behind him but creeping forward as he pedals, is a stroke of craft; and when Danny is stopped by ...”

“... love it sorrowfully’.C.L.R. James, the great Trinidadian radical and pan-African activist, a child of the British Empire and one of its fiercest critics, loved America with stubborn defiance, and would probably have taken citizenship if he hadn’t been deported as a foreign subversive in 1953. James had settled in New York in 1938, after the publication ...”

“... to wear, and telling them to answer his questions freely from behind it. To Anne he asked:what a child like her most wanted; she answered, ‘Age and experience.’ I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell) what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, ‘Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to ...”

“... neglect of the Guardians of the Boyle Union: KILSHALVEY ELECTORAL DIVISION – Mrs Kilkenny and child, after several applications for relief in vain; Mary Connell, found dead by a rick of turf; Philip M’Gowan’s wife and daughter; Bryan Flanagan, found dead by the road side; Widow Davy’s daughter; Andrew Davy. KILTURRA ELECTORAL DIVISION – John May ...”

“... was sometimes difficult to stick with the life she’d made in England. ‘Khadija was the eldest child,’ her brother Karim told me. ‘She was always like a second mother. She came to London a long time ago and worked to send money home. That was her first aim.’ And as that Tuesday evening came to an end Khadija sat up talking to friends on the ...”

“... life had been an attempt to prove himself to his father. In the wee small hours, he seemed like a child whose fantasy had gone too far. And the fantasy was not that he is Satoshi. He may well be Satoshi. The fantasy was that he could live as Satoshi, and take his place among the great men, and forget the little boy who was slapped for losing at chess. Like ...”