“... The death of Alexander III in 1286 without surviving issue and the subsequent death in 1290 of his young granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, while she was being brought to Scotland, left no clear heir and the kingdom plummeted into political turmoil. The main competitors for the throne in the ensuing Great Cause (overseen by Edward I of England) were soon ...”

“... with the awfulness of the period, setting the scene for a well-timed explosion of gossip and dirt. David Beckham, who once had a golden right foot, a sweet face, a high voice and a famous willingness to sit around in branded underpants while being photographed by the world’s press, might have proved a sensational subject all by himself, a ...”

“... damned at her feet: Marianne Faithfull, the ‘Fabulous Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his ...”

“... a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice.’ Boswell recounts how the young Johnson alighted on a folio edition of Petrarch while hunting for some apples his younger brother, Nathaniel, had hidden on a shelf. By the time he arrived in 1728 to study at Pembroke College, Oxford, Johnson had read, as he proudly recalled, ‘a great ...”

“... as a passage across temporal boundaries. In America, the old become displaced persons, while the young are quickly naturalised. Children carve out trades, professions, social roles and ways of changing nature that are unintelligible to their elders. They ‘invent their own wisdom about sexual mores, family life, food and clothing, where and how to ...”

“... to explain the point of colonies, to the colonisers if not to the colonised. It had to persuade young men and women to spend their lives, and often to risk them, on the frontiers of Empire. British Imperialism, as Kipling might have learnt from Trevelyan’s Competition Wallah, which he read on the boat out, conceived service in India as a rite of ...”

“... communities by international capital. In Bill Forsyth’s comic-utopian Local Hero (1983), the young executive sent to Scotland to buy a fishing village on behalf of Knox Oil and Gas has no other means of communicating with his boss in Houston, Texas, than from a public phone box on the quayside across the road from the hotel. The locals have a whip-round ...”

“... Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it.) It’s a different matter for young Tom’s Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath’. George MacDonald Fraser’s series of novels about him – known collectively as The Flashman Papers, the first of which appeared in 1969 – are, I would ...”

“... was to the friend of his old age, Audrey Napier-Smith, and it is touching because he was old, she young: but he is also making up to her, being flirtatious, a little coy. As my quotation from Betjeman shows, emphasising friendship can be a form of love-making without sex: intended to reassure, to flatter yourself and the other, to ask for a conscious ...”

“... The gross underestimation of the ability of the Lebanese to defend themselves is the main theme of David Hirst’s elegantly written and highly informed history. For many years one of the most perceptive correspondents in the Middle East, he says he decided to write this book after the 34-day war in the summer of 2006, when Israel rained explosives on Lebanon ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... off campaigning in 1992 so that he could be present during the execution of a mentally retarded young man in Little Rock. I wish I believed that reading some of the descriptions in this book would cause him to reflect. They would clearly not impress Attorney General Bob Butterworth of Florida. Commenting on a recent case in which the mask of an electrocuted ...”

“... up some nearly human features come into focus. Pointy bumps on the faces of the trunk are bones or young breasts. On the far side, the tall, shallow backward-arching suggests a body from shoulderblades to lumbar region. A buttock bulges on one side. High on the right the concavity of a wave breaking mounts to a chin – the only uncurvaceous bit apart from the ...”

“... by a selective chronology of the ‘angry decade’ of 1965-75. Its protagonists are a group of young student militants, inspired by the May Events in Paris in 1968, who had dropped out of Essex and Cambridge (two of them ripped up their finals papers), moved into communes in West and North-East London and become active in the squatting and ...”

“... 19th-century opium trade and its effects on the lives of a group of variously ordinary people: a young widow, an American sailor, a Krishna-worshipper who imagines himself as a woman, a heroic Untouchable, a Parsee-Chinese convict, an enigmatic lascar, a Francophone orphan, a boat boy, a rajah bilked by a ruthless British businessman – and many ...”