“... 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 ...”

“... His first sexual fantasy was of lying naked on a battlefield. Such are the images that can speed a young person into prose, living out the reality of a martyred mother and a dead father. His first attempt at authorship was ‘The History of My Friends’, a tiny manuscript he dictated to his mother. It taught him, Bucknell writes, that ‘friendship could be ...”

“... rising a little, his look reflective. These two fatigued pioneers are comfortably welcoming a young master and colleague. The Flaherty portrait recalls Ingres’s M. Bertin (the drawing, not the painting), the bluff man with his hands on his knees in defiance of all portrait convention. The glorious black-and-whiteness of all these portraits and scenes ...”

“... now safely dead and buried: there is no live bear to break out of its cage and retaliate. In 1995 Francis Beckett added his Enemy Within to the growing list of works. His researches were thorough; he had gone round meeting veterans of bygone days, nearly all of whom were happy to chew over their recollections with him. The book has now reappeared with an ...”

“... arrived from a figure whose word presumably still counts for something in Catholic circles. Pope Francis, in his ‘Letter to the Bishops of the United States’, not only rejected Vance’s Magafication of Augustine, but outlined his own understanding of the common good. The ‘true common good’, Francis wrote, ‘is ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... and died. In McEwan’s version, the boy, Adam Henry, is ‘a very strange and beautiful young man’. He is nearly 18, intelligent, charismatic and talented. Fiona, still reeling from Jack’s declaration, hears the case and then visits him in hospital to ascertain his state of mind, aware that what she is doing is a ‘highly unconventional’ and ...”

“... painted in 1601, has been hung next to The Taking of Christ from 1602.) This, after all, was the young Lombard’s calling card when Roman patrons led by Cardinal del Monte began commissioning Caravaggio in the mid-1590s: an unprecedented technical prowess, allowing him to deliver descriptions of physicality so acute and luscious that they left words ...”

“... noon to dinner, where the remains of yesterday’s venison and a couple of brave green [i.e. young] geese’. Wall wants to see recipes not only as the beguiling curiosities they evidently are, but also as sites for something like a domestic version of experimental science. One of the defining narratives of the 17th century is the rise of a new kind of ...”

“... to the dauphin. Her portrait from c.1558, on loan from the Royal Collection, shows a self-assured young woman putting a ring on the fourth finger of her right hand: an allusion to her marriage, but also to her assumption of authority (over how many realms was open to question). In the reports of the Venetian ambassador, Mary is wilful and impulsive; in ...”

“... the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer Anthony Hunt and the young Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, who were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of ...”

“... if we are not so daunted, it may be a sign that we are not taking those works very seriously. The young may well feel gratified by the confidence rested in their sophistication: but older readers, who tackled the works before Post-Modernism happened along, are bound to reflect wryly on their pitiful efforts of yesteryear; they must have resembled primitive ...”

“... off her head. A few Pritchettian genteel-weirdos are to be chanced upon around the margins of young Kingsley’s suburban London childhood, but the general picture of those years is as blurred for us as it evidently is, and maybe was, for him. (And no, we do not get told whose idea it was to call him Kingsley – some thing to do with Charles of that ...”