“... now hanging in Scone Palace, painted circa 1780 when Dido was in her late teens, shows two elegant young women with different skin colours but similar features. ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray’ by Johann Zoffany (1779) Dido’s life at Kenwood mirrored her ambivalent social status: she was not allowed to eat with the family but was ...”

“... the United States experienced a less obtrusive coup d’état: the hustled retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest of the three remaining liberals on the Supreme Court. The prematurely leaked announcement in late January took Breyer himself by surprise. But the leak wasn’t any more of a breach of constitutional decorum than the insistent lobbying ...”

“... a premium for the privilege of working for it. Huntington was an honourable exception. He paid his young aspirants 25 shillings a week, for which he worked us hard but gave us a thorough grounding in all aspects of the business: a grounding which is no longer possible, so far, at least, as the larger and more rigidly departmentalised firms are concerned. After ...”

“... attention has been paid to how depressing light entertainment can be: it’s no surprise that young people should be seeking out the challenging music of the post-punk years now, at a time when the public face of the industry is Simon Cowell. Similarly, the teenagers who formed Joy Division found their role models in bands from a previous era that had ...”

“... and relates, as evidence of the pioneer cosmonaut’s humanity, an act of kindness to a certain young poet (can it be ... yes, it was). The epilogue goes back in time to the pre-Revolutionary period and the philosopher Tsiolkovsky, whom Yevtushenko hails as the spiritual father of manned space research. Tsiolkovsky evidently promulgated a vitalist ...”

“... musical comedy is manifest. He is sure-footed where before he had floundered. The moment when the young widow and her landowner-creditor aim duelling pistols at each other has far more erotic charge than anything in Troilus, even its orchestral mimicry of copulation in Act Two. The Bear was well received by critics in the mid-1960s when Walton’s style could ...”

“... which history and culture have given it in England and Wales. A rape case will typically involve a young woman whose lifestyle is somewhere between the casual and the chaotic, and a young man who has found her in this situation and has forced himself on her. A disturbing proportion of these defendants turn out to have been ...”

“... way of formalising it. Asked back in England what the retreat to Dunkirk had been like, a languid young officer is said to have replied: ‘My dear – the noise, and the people.’ As good an impression as any that could be devised from (in his case) normal social experience. The fragment of Beowulf known as ‘The Finnsburgh Episode’ provides a standard ...”

“... history with that of their working-class contemporaries in the elementary schools of the day. Stephen Humphries’s story, on the other hand, theoretically covers both sexes, though boys and youths loom larger than their feminine counterparts, and his horizon does not extend beyond the working classes. Both stories are exceedingly well documented, but ...”

“... works, Ulysses revolves on a botched revelation or bungled epiphany, as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally meet to no momentous effect. Nothingness is a traditional topic of Irish writing, all the way from the negative theology of the great medieval schoolman John Scottus Eriugena to the vision of hell of Flann O’Brien’s The Third ...”

“... Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford in 1977 has failed to dim its reputation.Disappointingly,​ Stephen Greenblatt’s new study leaves the question of why and how Edward II still matters well alone, and his treatment of Marlowe’s sexuality is surprisingly under-informed by recent scholarship on queer identities in early modern culture. Then ...”

“... London​ in the time of Henry VIII had many colourful, even flamboyant, inhabitants. Stephen Vaughan was not one of them. His was a small life, full of frustrations; his chief characteristic was a pragmatic diligence, which gave him a good, if not brilliant, head for business. He was a merchant, a financier, a minor diplomat and an occasional low-grade spy ...”

“... making her own clothes for Bazaar, her King’s Road boutique, because she thought that ‘the young were tired of wearing essentially the same as their mothers.’ And the boutique revolution wasn’t just for women. Mod fashion was so changeable and lucrative that in 1964 John Stephen could set up the John ...”

“... NGO. DentAid’s UK operations began in 2015, providing a charitable alternative to what Stephen Armstrong calls ‘DIY Dentistry’. In a chapter that’s almost impossible to read without flinching, Armstrong tells story after story of individuals forced by the scarcity of public services and the cost of private treatment into ...”

“... in his lifetime. Two volumes of his letters had appeared by 1991, and the publication of Stephen Cooper’s biography more or less completes the picture, at least for the time being. Much of the credit for this must go to Fante’s indefatigable widow, whose stewardship of his reputation has played a very large part in the continuing campaign for his ...”