“... 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 ...”

“... regular appearances at South Coast magistrates’ courts after Bank Holiday weekends. Trevor Francis, usually the identikit poet, dreamer and heart-throb of the lower sixth, looked like a mean and frazzled brawler when he missed that easy header in the second half. As for Terry McDermott, who cuts a pretty unreliable figure at the best of times ... By ...”

“... the period of learning, of dependence and of socialisation which is characteristic of the very young animal. Neoteny is not just another candidate among a plethora of untestable ideas. There are certain genetic constraints in man’s emergence. One of them is the relatively short time available, and the other is the fragility of our genetic structure. This ...”

“... to save not only himself but also the ship’s Maltese mess steward, was painted as a lad in a ‘Young England’ portrait competition, and I have the oil to this day because in boyhood I was held to have a likeness to the old mariner. I won’t say I wasn’t touched when a visitor mistook it recently for a painting of my firstborn son. So it’s the minute ...”

“... mob’s sadistic attacks on former slaves, the atrocious slaughter of the war – these confirm young Quinn’s apprehension that ‘violence was the norm of this bellicose world.’ And yet, as he realises at the end of his book, there was ‘an unconscionable pang of pleasure’ in writing about such things, however terrible – indeed Quinn’s or ...”