“... reproduced in Monk’s book, which was taken in Swansea in 1945 by Ben Richards – a young man almost forty years Wittgenstein’s junior with whom he was then despairingly in love. Even at this distance of time, and in two-dimensional monochrome, it is hard to meet Wittgenstein’s gaze full-on for very long. The eyes engage you ...”

“... specific location can be divined from the clues, the search party will travel there to inspect the young males of the area for signs of godhead. Often, the searchers will carry props with them and carry out recognition tests: the boys may be shown a collection of artefacts, some of which belonged to the previous bodhisattva, and asked to pick from ...”

“... in literary journals, attacked Popa. ‘How is it possible that such texts can be written by a young writer and published by a renowned literary magazine?’ one demanded to know. The age demanded paeans to the struggle of the working classes and got avant-garde poetry instead. Others griped about Popa’s hermeticism: even the title of the book is ...”

“... Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed ...”

“... the world to rural Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of ...”

“... of Timber (or ‘Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter’). In an age when most writers burned out young, Jonson kept on going. Right at the end, embattled by debt and alcoholism, half-paralysed by a stroke, he was still at work. Among his last pieces was probably the English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640. It shows him still niggling away at the nuts ...”

“... to your mind these days as you walk up Cork Street. And yet Soho’s survivors – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, even Jeffrey Bernard to name three who appear quite often in Spalding’s book – show what can be won by sticking to your line. What they do now and did then is more interesting than what a lot of people who thought they were overtaking them in ...”

“... and opened up the country. I hear of a Liberian aid worker who was driving up north and met some young former combatants. They charged the vehicle with machetes, but the driver didn’t flinch. ‘I’m not scared,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the power now, not you.’ That’s optimistic. Most of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and ...”

“... we’re talking fiction or fact. Five of Melissa Bank’s stories feature the same heroine, a young woman called Jane Rosenal. The first two Jane stories are classical middle-class American Eastern seaboard tales of teenage nostalgia, with penny loafers and sailing expeditions and little clams. The middle two are transitional, with a much-older-man ...”

“... being both economical and spendthrift with the truth. Acceptable glories – the knighting of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Francis Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a ...”

“... In 1931 she came out, went to dances, had beaux and settled into the rest of her life. Several young men proposed to her and for no reason that anyone can now remember she said yes to Shane O’Neill, a tall young man with a job in the City, whose family, Mr Amory reports, is ‘the most ancient in Europe that it has ...”

“... in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead’ and laughing at ‘the society that had reared them’.The four cast members of Beyond the Fringe soon decamped to New York, where the revue achieved even longer-running success on Broadway than it ...”

“... years later in her memoir, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. ‘If you must curtsey to a man young enough to be your grandson,’ she wrote, ‘it is at least some consolation to know that he believes himself to be God … The prince was good enough to say his own royal name to me two or three times, but alas! I forgot it.’ This was a typical Harrison ...”

“... slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover’. It may be that Byron was in the nick of time to prevent a girl he had seduced from being dumped in the Aegean. The fineness of the poem does not depend on his exposure to the practice but on his deep sense of involvement with the ...”

“... the Sierra Leone colony in 1808, British abolitionists set up a school in South London for those young Africans who would ‘afford the best means of promoting the great ends of the settlement’. This meant the promotion of Christianity, the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of ‘legitimate’ trade. The idea came from the Clapham Sect of ...”