“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a passer-by shouts: ‘Greedy!’ She was the sort of person whose luggage is carried by helpful young men, and yet she regarded the world with defiance, answering inquiries with a toss of the head, and carrying her umbrella like a weapon. This umbrella, with which she repelled tiresome children on the beach, was part of her Victorian character as ‘Miss ...”

“... Burns the Radical (2002), which shows how the American Revolution formed his opinions when he was young, and shaped his expectations of the French Revolution. Patrick Scott Hogg would like Burns to have been an active member of the Dumfries branch of the radical group Friends of the People in 1793; he may have been, but the proof isn’t ...”

“... just top-quality calfskin. It was ‘virgin parchment, such as never bore hair’: the skin of ‘young things found in the dam’s belly’ – Hilliard called it ‘abortive’ vellum. It was carefully stretched and smoothed, then pasted onto card. Many of his miniatures are backed with playing cards: sometimes the face of the card is left visible so a ...”

“... and lovable, too. So in 1765 Samuel Johnson appended to Rowe’s life the story that when young Will was doing time as the early modern equivalent of a car-park attendant, looking after playgoers’ horses outside a London theatre, ‘he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, that in a short time every man as he alighted called for Will ...”

“... Jack Kerouac’s short life, big talent and last dollar were all just about exhausted when the young writer Joyce Glassman bought him a dinner of hot dogs and beans on a Saturday night in New York City in January 1957. Glassman understood he was broke, but the rest she learned only later. She thought Kerouac was beautiful, with his blue eyes and sunburned skin ...”

“... soon afterwards, complaining that ‘news management’ had become ‘news invention’. Even the young Queen Elizabeth was moved to remark to her press secretary: ‘I think the basic dishonesty of the whole thing was a trouble.’ Now, 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the ...”

“... two differences. In Huston’s version, one of the doctors attending the demonstration is the young Freud himself, fresh off the train from Vienna. And, more significant, while in Brouillet’s painting the audience’s eyes converge on a female subject who fully obeys the will of her Master, Huston also portrays a male patient, no less hysterical and ...”

“... a newness in that, painting what you feel in a way that engages the nervous system of the viewer. Francis Bacon was doing it too: Eardley and Bacon were included in a series of group shows at the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London in the late 1950s. The paintings that emerged from Eardley’s work with the Samson children are sometimes taken for ...”

“... the family lived in the ‘style of millionaire paupers’, and care was taken to give the young David Cornwell the best of public school educations, and a thorough grounding in the codes of upper-class Englishness. The son of a crook, Cornwell was brought up a gent. By his own account, the young Cornwell, subjected ...”