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“... of female society), those who play professional football do not: they are still overwhelmingly young workingclass men. Which brings us to Arsenal. To the extent that any individual club historically stands for this culture (for better and worse) it is Arsenal: no other club has had such continuous membership of whatever has been at the time the senior ...”

“... No two pictures​ of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much flashbulb ...”

“... James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. After spells in the US as a teenager, London as a young adult, he returned to Glasgow, where he now lives and works. Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1956. She worked in Ayrshire as a schoolteacher until recently, when she started making enough money from her writing to give up teaching and move to Glasgow ...”

“... subject, with one more in preparation that I can swear to and several preceding ones, ranging from Stephen Birmingham’s work to Kitty Kelly’s Jackie Oh! to Jackie Under My Skin by the Yale semiotician Wayne Koestenbaum. Specialist markets within the domain of Jackie studies include Camelot freaks, of course, but also the ‘gay icon’ sub-strain which ...”

“... pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. ‘He did well here, and died ...”

“... of Wales had her own court at Ludlow Castle, and went on her own mini-royal progresses. She was a young teenager before she became aware of the threat to her mother’s marriage and to her own position; but after 1533, aged 17, she could not avoid isolation and humiliation. In 1536 she was declared illegitimate since Katherine’s marriage was declared never ...”

“... When John Curtis left Penguin for Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1957 (leaving the vacancy that the young Tom Maschler would fill), he was told two things. At Weidenfeld and Nicolson, authority was not devolved via committee: this was George Weidenfeld’s show. Second, Curtis was told, the aim of the house was to ‘open a window to Europe and the world’. So ...”

“... emotional applause. The most startling contribution to the meeting comes from the paper’s young property correspondent, the normally shy Caroline McGhie: ‘Do you realise,’ she asks Andrew Neil, ‘that you have betrayed your own journalists and lost our confidence entirely?’ As the afternoon meeting creaks into motion I begin to understand how ...”

“... the idol of a little boy who wants to join the Navy, and he dances around a fountain with a young girl made up to look Mexican. This dance was particularly hard to rehearse because Stanley Donen (then Kelly’s assistant, later his co-director) had to teach the child the steps. After some gruelling rehearsals, Donen was so desperate he said he ...”

“... up her clothes in a very uncivil way’ was describing forced sex. Another was tripped up by a young man who threw her on the ground, ‘taking up her clothes, leaving her naked, and attempting to have his pleasure with her’. Such narratives were not then, as they would be now, stories of rape. The crime of rape was slowly undergoing a process of ...”

“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

“... that I had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did ...”

“... persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being,’ the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said. Scientists use pictures more than most academics, but ‘somewhere along the way’, he cautioned, they have lost the sense that it’s wrong to identify pictures with the realities they represent. We say that we ‘see’ a four-week ...”

“... universities, infiltrated the ranks of the professoriat and proceeded to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in ...”

“... in ordinary, day-to-day life. In Lark and Termite (2009), her most recent novel but one, the young protagonist bakes for her disabled younger brother: Nonie hates the idea of blue cake, she says it looks like something old and spoiled, too old to eat, though it’s light and delicate and flavoured with anise. But Termite likes it, and he likes pink cake ...”