“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or crumbling old campus, and will not have to cope with superseded elderly professors or thrusting young ones.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were Lithuanian Jews who settled in the East End and made the familiar move to Hampstead; that the young Goodman’s environment, though far from rich, was civilised, offering good food, good music, much kindness and a tolerance of learning. (These Jewish origins, and a continuing fidelity to the culture, are important, though David Selbourne, as his title ...”

“... attached is pretty odd, what with querulous, prickly Vera, irresistibly blonde Eden, and provoking Francis, Vera’s son, who spends his holidays devising torments for his mother. Within a year or two another child is added to this intractable household, and it’s a tussle over the custody of this child, Jamie, that brings about the pivotal outbreak in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it – with every inch of my body? Ivano and Valentino, staying together at San Francisco’s St Francis Hotel while filming Moran of the Lady Letty, enjoyed a brisk and bacchic itinerary: After shooting outdoors from seven in the morning until seven at night, they’d bathe, put on bathrobes, and order dinner in. Then they’d sleep a few hours, setting ...”