“... 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 ...”

“... which invokes Rilke, Cervantes, Cocteau, La Bruyère, Desnos, Eluard, Gogol, Beckett, Kafka and St Francis. ‘It’s not that these are inappropriate or misleading points of cultural reference in a serious attempt to explain the place and importance of M. Hulot,’ he explains. ‘It’s just that Tati had never read any of them, and never would.’ (One of ...”

“... earlier, and this was the first test to establish whether a Scottish subject, in this case the young Robert Calvin, had the same rights in England as James’s English subjects. The judges decided – or rather, affirmed – that in English common law, subjecthood was acquired through birth in the country (jus soli), rather than through parental descent ...”

“... establishment Podemos refers to as ‘la casta’. The Podemos project began with a small group of young politics lecturers at Madrid’s Complutense University – Iglesias, along with Luis Alegre, Germán Cano, Juan Carlos Monedero and Iñigo Errejón – who were interested in the question of how to channel the energy of the indignados. Drawing on the ideas ...”

“... or early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his ...”

“... or crumbling old campus, and will not have to cope with superseded elderly professors or thrusting young ones. The new Lurie doesn’t resemble a Bradbury or Lodge, or for that matter an early Lurie, so much as William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, which also investigates how members of one Anglophone culture don’t merely observe but exploit the other one. The ...”

“... savour the absurdity as much as Johnson does. In Rustic Sounds and Other Studies the naturalist Francis Darwin describes how both he and a friend ‘inexplicably’ fell down at the Cobb at Lyme Regis where Louisa Musgrove falls in Persuasion. Johnson decides that the ‘slippery character of the surface’ – Darwin’s explanation – is not ...”

“... and in eloquence, and introduced him into the court as sewer-extraordinary in 1516, aged 13. The young Wyatt had fortune on his side. He was handsome (‘there was no prettier man at court than he’), a virtuosic horseman, quick to pick up languages, and clever beyond all his contemporaries. He glittered. In his youth, according to George Wyatt, Thomas ...”

“... ash trees had already been destroyed: a bleak piece of news until it transpired that most were young trees, still in the nursery or lately planted out. The Telegraph, too, was on a roll, having brandished the same figures and threatened the long-suffering British rambler – and his dog – with a life behind closed doors in a piece it ...”

“... that the Judgment hangs beside the Glasgow picture (in which I persist in seeing Susanna and the young Daniel), both reveal their beauty as never before. It is a sign that we have pictures in their right context. Can we really doubt who these two masterpieces were predominantly due to? Looking at the Judgment of Solomon, we can imagine the radiance and ...”

“... were among the chief promoters of the Gallery, and they were much concerned to encourage young artists to measure their achievements against those of the Old Masters. Although their paternalism was often resented, creating paintings that would be regarded as modern equivalents to the work of Claude, Teniers, Poussin or Cuyp, was a fundamental ...”

“... the younger, duller and constantly out-rivalled sibling. Even before birth she is upstaged by a young Fran who responds to her mother’s pregnancy with a first (phony) suicide attempt. Having failed to abort Suzy, Fran reacts to her birth by silence and bed-wetting. She gets the desired paternal sympathy: ‘Her father told her he too had wet the bed as a ...”

“... possibility she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between them, eight of these before Mansfield Park was published. And she wasn’t too delicate to risk such an allusion. Many years after Austen’s death, her ...”

“... be afraid.’ There’s a romance with a childhood friend that soon goes wrong, soured by the young man’s resentment of her success in her career. He’s a journalist, though the characterisation here is paper thin. ‘“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said after a brooding pause. “Perhaps my place is in Europe. Report from there. From the front ...”

“... most startling is a sentence contained in a note of condolence he wrote a cousin who had lost his young wife: ‘never in my life having lost one near relation, I daresay I cannot imagine how severe grief such as yours must be.’ Darwin noted in his Autobiography, written when he was an old man, that he could remember very little about his mother, and partly ...”