“... contest within the BBC had been between the guardians of the Reithian heritage and provocative young producers in drama and satire who sought to turn the BBC into a site of political and cultural opposition. During most of that time, there was a fragile armistice – even sometimes an alliance – between satirists, drama producers and documentary makers ...”

“... that the favourable Greek attitude to homosexuality derived from a phase of history in which a young male was prepared for the rites de passage from which he would emerge as a full warrior by the tuition of an older male who was his lover. Further, the American scholar David Halperin published A Hundred Years of ...”

“... it shared Carthage’s fate, the better. ‘National hatred must sound forth,’ he trumpeted. ‘Young republicans should suck a hatred of the name Englishman with their mother’s milk.’ The English were ‘a populace foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear.’ It seems that he meant this last sentence all too literally, for he ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...”

“... I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me ...”

“... and in the usual form – love, for instance, unrequited, gone wrong, renewed, consummated, young, forbidden, discovered, doomed, forgotten, repressed. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is the latest literary bestseller to hit the US (and, remarkably, the UK). Its surprising success owes much to the strength ...”

“... of describing some of the difficulties Gillian Flynn had in adapting her slick novel Gone Girl for David Fincher’s film of the same name. The novel alternates between two stories, a husband’s and a wife’s. Neither is entirely telling the truth, but both are telling us plenty, and novels love this kind of game. The film begins and ends with the ...”

“... The main problem for David Nokes or for any other biographer of Swift is that the agenda has already been prescribed. Within a few years of Swift’s death in 1745, questions were raised which are still the standard issues. What kind of man wrote the fourth Voyage of Gulliver’s Travels? Did his imagination give him away? ‘In painting Yahoos he becomes one himself,’ according to the Earl of Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift (1752 ...”

“... youth. The pen was in his hand and the memory was too intense to hold back another minute. Young Sam had been playing hooky from school. Anticipating a whipping at home he slipped through the window of his father’s law office and settled himself for the night. ‘As I lay on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness,’ Twain ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim, the destabilising of the Holy Roman Emperor, the flight of the young Louis XIV from Paris in the face of popular revolt, the trial of Charles I and Philip IV of Spain’s loss of Portugal and its empire: a flood of usurpations and revolutions, as he put it, ‘almost from one end of the world to the other’. Voltaire’s ...”

“... to opposite effect on successive occasions, like the play/pause button on an online video. The young Henry James, paraded before William Makepeace Thackeray, who had come to America to lecture on ‘The English Humorists’, found himself under ominous if kindly inspection. ‘The main resource of a small New York boy … at that time was the little ...”

“... by observing the riotous behaviour of the commons in some disputes over common lands during his young days at Malmesbury. The book is not really about riots as much as it is about resistance to enclosures. His final sentence sums it up nicely: the villagers, he says, were ‘vainly attempting to restore a lost world which may never have existed’. The ...”

“... because the dirty work is done by his deputy. No wonder he is the first politician – since the young Fascist leader of the Thirties – to be known by his Christian name. In fact, Gonzalez is also a ruthless politician, as Richard Gillespie demonstrates in his account of the Sevillians’ takeover of the Party. After demolishing the Llopis Old Guard in ...”

“... of small, brilliantly-coloured transparencies. But the detail is enthralling. It’s 1967: a young family bound for the Outer Hebrides, we drive across the moor at Culloden, skirting the plain where long low humps in the coarse grass and stunted heather cover the skeletons of the 1100 Highlanders killed in that April hour of 1746, each clan with its name ...”