“... appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men thrusting their way through wartime Whitehall, where he made a name for himself with his prodigious memory and command of statistics. After entering Parliament for Labour in 1945 and becoming the youngest cabinet minister in more than a century, Wilson ...”

“... a story Barthelme described as a ‘response’ to the Vietnam War, a wise woman observes that ‘young people … run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society.’ The narrator visits her for advice after trying to ‘defend the city’ from invaders by constructing a barricade out of frying pans, wine bottles, ‘a ...”

“... 1934 he told his BBC listeners that ‘the spirit of the youth movement still inspires many of the young officers in the labour camps and fills many students with the belief that they are digging the foundations of a new German socialism.’ Not that Crossman, in praising what he called the ‘idealism’ of the Hitler Youth, shared these ideals himself. More ...”

“... and had catapulted him into fame overnight. Belinsky had also been the animator of a group of young writers known as the Natural School, out of which came the classic Russian 19th-century novel; and his pléiade, as it was also called, was the vibrant centre of everything that was then progressive. Dostoevsky had written some scurrilous words about ...”

“... Lancashire aristocracy, they favoured the old faith. Similarly Shakespeare, a socially ambitious young man, could have been loudly anti-Catholic, as in King John, without abandoning the family beliefs. He was ‘an exemplary Elizabethan venturer’ – not, as Thomson agrees, that this fact is of paramount importance, but it is well to know he wasn’t ...”

“... in Iquique kept the Iran-Iraq war going nicely, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of young men with his specially cheap cluster bombs. These could only have been manufactured with American technology which was made available to Cardoen courtesy of the CIA, in gross breach of the spirit and letter of US law. One of Cardoen’s admirers was the US ...”

“... placed before the public. Attlee was officially recognised as a great man with the publication of Kenneth Harris’s biography in 1982. Harris enlarged Attlee’s stature in two different respects. It had always been suspected that Attlee, though something of a dark horse, was a wholly sane and balanced human being of absolute moral integrity. Harris ...”

“... but older certainly than Heseltine’s. And Alan, moreover, was the son of a celebrated aesthete, Kenneth Clark, whose cultivated snootiness made the cash seem older than it was. And as to his son’s personal credentials: who could fault them? He went to Eton and to Oxford, he lived in a castle stuffed with priceless paintings, he owned garage-loads of ...”

“... politically correct thought police. Rupert Bear is a racist, offensive character who is poisoning young minds ... Move over Rupert ... there’s more candidates for Nutwood.’ The editors’ first priority is to make all 30 pages of the paper appeal to the punters, but their most important political object is to help the Tories move further to the ...”

“... Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could find enough of them.) One anonymous writer, here rescued from oblivion, divined that Eliot’s aim ...”

“... recently saved a further colleague, Victor Pasmore, from court martial for desertion by leaning on Kenneth Clark to vouch for him as ‘one of the six best painters in England’, but artistically the two were by now on very different tacks. More urgently, there was now no woman, or prospect of a woman, left to give focus to Coldstream’s life. Four years ...”

“... have been regularly rethought. The only constant, as one former census bureau director, Kenneth Prewitt, admitted, is that they are ‘never politically neutral’. For example, the category of ‘Free Coloured Persons’ was introduced in 1820 largely because pro-slavery apologists were determined to prove that freedom made former slaves ...”

“... Latin prose he also praised. And there were active Latinists elsewhere as well. In the 1930s, the young Viennese scholar Ernst Gombrich wrote charming, playful compositions in medieval Latin. Even now eager students stream to programmes like those of the Paideia Institute, where they not only read but speak, sing and rap in Latin while on summer courses in ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac ...”

“... municipal scallywags like Derek Hatton. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are all very well for the young, but the real pleasure of middle age is schadenfreude. Sometimes, when one looks back at the long line of Thatcher’s villains, one has to concede that, however much one disliked Thatcher’s triumphalism at the time, one could hardly wish the battle to ...”