“... docile animals, still commonplace in our schools and churches, seems to have been invented by St Francis of Assisi, elaborating a mere hint in Luke. And of course it was Prince Albert who brought in the uncanonical Nordic Christmas tree. For the laity, and especially its juvenile members, the build-up of extra marvels is acceptable because, whatever some say ...”

“... all in the name of bringing civilisation to people who were thought to be ‘barbarous’. Francis Suther, the principal factor of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland and organiser of the evictions of 1819-20, described these homes as ‘huts’. When the Sutherlands entered on their ‘reforms’, they thought there were three thousand people living in ...”

“... communities by international capital. In Bill Forsyth’s comic-utopian Local Hero (1983), the young executive sent to Scotland to buy a fishing village on behalf of Knox Oil and Gas has no other means of communicating with his boss in Houston, Texas, than from a public phone box on the quayside across the road from the hotel. The locals have a whip-round ...”

“... the pre-1914 welfare economist A.C. Pigou, whose lack of interest in ideology and keen interest in young mountaineers was supposedly deliberate cover enabling him to suborn those politically committed to the left. (As will be seen, King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it ...”

“... Spenser and Sidney. Both poems include fulsome dedications to the Earl of Southampton, a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish ...”

“... who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is ...”

“... is one         Free in soul beneath the sun.Mazzini might die ‘chainless’, but the young poet’s sense of honour felt shackled. ‘Too long the world has waited,’ the second stanza begins, ‘Against his chain the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in ...”

“... though the money would never arrive. Emecheta was 22, eight months pregnant, mother to four young children already and far from family and home. ‘I stripped from my mind any idle or wasteful thoughts,’ she said, and tried to see the advantages of being forced to make another sort of life, one the culture she’d grown up in hadn’t prepared her ...”

“... medieval manuscripts, important naval documents, an early copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia and Francis Drake’s personal almanac. Nearly everything in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana – as Pepys insisted it forever be called – was tantalisingly rare and had become even rarer after the Great Fire devastated London booksellers. Magdalene was in no position to ...”

“... Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales though, and most of the ...”

“... or settle for palliative care which at its best is a comfortable death without pain. What Francis Bacon called ‘a fair and easy passage’, which I used as the title of a TV play written and broadcast long ago. An announcement of forthcoming but more or less certain death by a public figure opens our eyes to death, the one that is coming to us ...”

“... the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She recognises them as women of the same ‘type’ as her: unattached, independent, sexually ambiguous. They dress like her, and wear their hair cut in a similar style. But they seem to inhabit a different world: their lamps have very ...”

“... of how physical reasoning might be applied to biological problems, stimulated a number of young physicists to enter the rapidly-burgeoning field of molecular biology. The French geneticist and Nobel laureate François Jacob recalled: After the war, many young physicists were disgusted by the military use that had ...”

“... respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in ...”

“... Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t ...”