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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ense. Humboldt spent the last decades of his life playing the part of the great man. He promoted young scientists and kept up a huge international correspondence – as many as 2000 letters a year, even at the end. Above all, he wrote. An account of the Russian trip finally came out in 1843. By then Humboldt was already at work on his most ambitious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... responded to England as a model and as a refuge. He also provides a savage account of the ‘young fogies’ who gathered around Charles Moore’s Spectator in the 1980s, trying and succeeding to become walking parodies of the most blimpishly insular sort of Englishman. I can think of few better illustrations of the way national stereotypes are shaped ...”

“... One day, in the early years of the 20th century, a poetically-minded young man from the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British politics has been said, with decreasing plausibility, to rest. None, however, has a politically able team behind them. Almost anything ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... even further away? Eight years later, in the Deheisha refugee camp on the occupied West Bank, David Grossman experienced a faintly similar phenomenon. He was listening to an old Palestinian woman remembering her past, in the village of Ain Azrab, baking bread over a straw fire, the woman all the time unconsciously working her fingers through the motion of ...”