“... he began composing, and also sketching opera plots; his family thought they had done well for the young man in obtaining a post for him as conductor at the Magdeburg Theatre. It turned out to be a disaster: Wagner was not paid properly; and after a performance of his opera was cancelled because the cast had beaten itself bloody in a brawl before the curtain ...”

“... illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In 1881 the Haggards had returned to Britain, leaving their fellow settlers to buy and sell the veldt for what it would fetch, or dig vast holes in search of gold and diamonds. Haggard had then ...”

“... in the society pages. In keeping with the laws of the time, Butler was given custody of their two young children. To Kemble’s dismay, their daughter inherited her father’s outlook on slavery and strongly supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War. Before then, however, Butler’s gambling losses and financial reverses triggered by the Panic of ...”

“... Riverside (Maritime). She was carrying an elderly couple and one distracted, finger-scrolling young man. Back in August 2007 the Lower Thames and Medway Passenger Boat Company Ltd, owners and operators of the Duchess M, were fined £18,000 (with £9000 costs) for transporting more passengers than the vessel certification allowed: ninety temporary migrants ...”

“... of the facts of Keats’s life and its English context. Thirty years have passed since then, and Andrew Motion remarks, reasonably enough, in the Introduction to his new life of Keats, that ‘the lives of all important writers need to be reconsidered at regular intervals, no matter how familiar they might be’: The Keats that has come down to us is finely ...”

“... that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by Duveen himself): the conservative decorator and the conservative architect. They provided appropriate settings for Bellini and Botticelli among the tapestries and ...”

“... del secolo scorso.) Like other parties, the British CP in its heyday was disproportionately young. Like them, it lived long enough for the young it recruited at successive historical moments – and with different motivations – to grow older, marry and engender a second generation of Party members, or more likely ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... to co-operate with his biographer. Ramaphosa, an immensely private person, began as a workaholic young lawyer who, after a period of religious and student activism, worked for the National Union of Mineworkers, one of the country’s largest unions, eventually becoming its leader and thus one of the most significant figures in the internal resistance to ...”

“... Babylon as ‘people in a transparent elevator’, or when he flippantly notes that Degas’s young spartans ‘crouch and stretch purely for the benefit of the artist’. Such moments are surprisingly rare. More often one finds oneself in niggling disagreement. For instance, at the apex of Juan Gris’s collage, Breakfast (1914), he discovers ‘a packet ...”

“... got there before he did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages ...”

“... seems to have been a meeting with George Saintsbury in Bath. According to Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett, the pair discussed the ‘sense of fellowship felt by people who had shared a powerful joint experience – whether fighting in war, or membership of a Mason’s lodge, even familiarity with the works of an author such as Austen’. Kipling decided ...”

“... of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference that the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White House at all – as under Reagan. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the Conservative Party. Its two transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the rates. Labour won back the GLC in 1973, but ...”