“... and reassesses Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World (1977). A stocky heavy-headed young man, I used to see him at Oxford seemingly always on his way back from squash. I knew at the time he was formidably clever and from a distance (with me it was always from a distance) fancied him rotten. On reflection, it was partly his name I found so ...”

“... corps called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which Khomeini had set up to harness the young ideologues who had brought him to power. It immediately entered into rivalry with the regular forces, whom Khomeini suspected – rightly, in the case of some officers – of favouring a restoration of the monarchy. Hossein had become leader of his group of ...”

“... the Second World War and now St Lucian pig farmer, is obsessed with Helen, the proud and beautiful young woman who used to work as his wife Maud’s maid. He identifies her with her island and tries to discover its ‘true place’ in imperial history. Together, his obsession and research make him neglect Maud and at her death, filled with remorse, he gives ...”

“... was master in his own house whereas Kasmin had a backer, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a young Guinness heir. Another was that Fraser lacked the experience in running a gallery that Kasmin had. Born in 1934, Kasmin had worked from 1956 to 1958 at Gallery One under Victor Musgrave, a true pioneer who in the 1950s was the first dealer in London to show ...”

“... or call what he had ample reason – the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall – to suppose was only the young President’s bluff? The crisis in the Cuban missile crisis ended halfway into the second day – Wednesday 24 October – when a meeting between Kennedy and his advisers was interrupted by a report that six Soviet ships had stopped in mid-ocean rather than ...”

“... himself (who also funded it with a legacy from his grandfather), Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. Like most avant-garde magazines, Locus Solus (named after Roussel’s second prose novel, published in 1914, and with an epigraph from his final long poem, from 1932, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique), was founded primarily as a forum for the work ...”

“... with such inscriptions as ‘Babies’ and ‘Children’. Last week Queen Mary was here, and young Mr Blunt, who is on our staff, was presented to her, as his aunt happens to be the chief official of the Needlework Guild. By this time the idea of incorporating the institute into the University of London had been raised, and in July 1939, after the last ...”

“... claim allegiance.’ For all the affected stateliness of his early prose, Duncan became known as a young man for stirring up mostly benign mayhem. Marjorie McKee, his partner for a brief and disastrous experiment in heterosexual marriage, said he ‘could stand chaos better than anyone I knew’, and Jarnot shows that much of the chaos was of his own ...”

“... of those who were once thought part of Labour’s natural constituency – the social underdogs. Young working-class males are more likely to go to jail under Labour; they are more likely to be excluded from school; their parents are more likely to be judged incompetent; their style of life is more likely to be thought socially dysfunctional; and the ...”

“... he was better than his circumstances had made him. After Cambridge, he did what many intelligent young men without money would do, and became a clergyman, eased into modest preferment by influential relatives. Another uncle, Jaques Sterne, an affluent and worldly churchman, with whom he would later quarrel, was a considerable help in the early years. But ...”

“... We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for example, Hoggart ...”

“... to celebrate its rebuilding. Brave Enterprise was written by the theatre’s publicist, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, who had moved to Stratford in 1925, after being appointed drama critic of the Stratford Herald on the recommendation of his famous second cousin, G.K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 in South Africa, where his father supervised a gold mine, A.K. had ...”

“... of afterglow or mark left behind by one’s ancestors. It is as if, to paraphrase a formula of Kenneth Burke’s, words are not simply the signs of things but rather, and to a crucial degree, things are themselves the signs of words. A densely suggestive passage early in the book is meant to hint at these possibilities, and particularly at the child’s ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”