“... fruit on them. Before fire suppression they rarely got that old, because they burn very easily. Young lodgepoles were regularly burned in small fires – indeed, the lodgepole adapted to this by maturing quickly, producing a lot of seed and being the first tree to recolonise burned ground. The logging companies’ favoured lumber source in the ...”

“... sickness’). The report described 43 people from three different communities, most of them young women, who were ‘struck down’ and left in a trance-like state, struggling to breathe, shaking and convulsing. O’Sullivan watched videos of these attacks and thought they resembled the functional seizures seen in her London clinic, usually on the ...”

“... Mayeur, a retired slave trader turned historian, was recounting the rituals at the coronation of a young man called Ratsimilaho, the son of an English pirate captain and a Malagasy princess, who was installed in 1720 as ruler of a new political entity on the coast of north-eastern Madagascar, the Betsimisaraka Confederation. Centred on the town of ...”

“... time. And Lord is no snob: he can be just as odious when presenting non-celebrities. A pretty young woman could make her living in Montparnasse without a specific occupation. She could encourage the clients in a bar to do a bit more drinking, or strike up acquaintance with potential admirers who might be glad to give a girl a helping hand without ...”

“... reflection of Victorian society. It has the same plot as David Copperfield. When it starts, young Francis Conway is the child of a pretty young mother and an ineffective but still employed father. However, Dad immediately loses his job and commits suicide rather than descend from the suburbs to the tower-blocks ...”

“... most fascinating of such texts, the ‘Passion’ of Perpetua. Vibia Perpetua was an aristocratic young married woman (still breastfeeding her first child), recently converted to Christianity, who was executed in the arena at Carthage in 202. Her ‘Passion’, the work of a male editor, is remarkable for incorporating Perpetua’s own prison diary, the only ...”

“... Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either. And Brian Burch, Trump’s nominee as ambassador to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the ...”

“... My problems began​ in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show ...”

“... was raised by the same infernal principles.At the centre of the maelstrom is a speech by Adneia, a young Yanomami woman. In one of those dramatic accidents that so often attend filmmaking, Mosse’s reel runs out in the middle of her declamation, leaving the screen in darkness for several minutes as she castigates Bolsonaro, who unleashed frontier capitalism ...”

“... The period​ in Francis Bacon’s life between 1933 and 1944 remains a mystery. We know who he was seeing and where he was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion ...”

“... tells a story about Sir Granville Ram, first Parliamentary Counsel and as English as Cornwall. A young Hindu on secondment to the London Office ingenuously inquired if Ram had Indian ancestry. ‘I’m pretty sure it was a joke,’ says Kent, ‘but he perceived from our shocked looks that it was in bad taste and should not be pursued.’ Kent the law-maker ...”

“... advocates who bully their way to victory; judges mostly do their best to be fair; the frailties of young and vulnerable witnesses and defendants are better recognised; juries are robust; we do not execute people for their crimes. For all this at least we can be ...”

“... up in criminal justice, a bus fare (if there’s a bus) is a significant outlay. And for some young defendants and witnesses in the cities, crossing areas where hostile gangs operate is a dangerous prospect. Lines of accountability are blurred, as in so many of our outsourced public-private entities. The churn of ministers means that no one is in office ...”

“... at UCL found that, between 2000 and 2018, there was a twenty-fold increase in ADHD diagnoses among young men and a near fifty-fold increase in prescriptions. There are a wealth of generic suppliers of most cardiac or diabetic medications, but only a limited number of manufacturers of ADHD drugs, which means that a hiccup in a single company’s supply chain ...”

“... is about a poker-player and pool hustler called Billy Phelan, who meets his long-lost father, Francis, toward the end of the book. The old man looks like ‘Pete the Tramp without a hat, without the spiky moustache, without the comedy’. Billy asks Francis: ‘What happened to your finger?’ The father ...”