“... On a wintry Paris day a decade before the French Revolution, the young Manon Phlipon did something daring. Left alone at home one day, she took it into her head to dress up in clothes belonging to the family servant: a ragged blue ankle-length dress with a long, faded red apron, and a rough cotton shawl and hood over the top ...”

“... Charles Ray’s​ life-sized Young Man, machine-milled in 2012 from a solid stainless-steel block, is meant, Ray says, ‘to move forwards and backwards in increasingly irrelevant time’. The phrase is less opaque than it seems. His ambition was to make a kouros, but one modelled on the body of a long-time Los Angeles friend ...”

“... and racism sheltering under the authority of ‘traditional’ Classical scholarship. Now Dudley Young (in a more modest 350 pages) joins in the campaign – with a differently aimed, but equally impassioned, attack on ‘the Greeks’ as we think we know them. For Young, the ‘achievements’ of Greek civilisation ...”

“... authorised? Who would you ask? George W. – ‘W’ in this instance standing for ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’ – Bush? Or perhaps the Queen, within yards of whom, the Evening Standard was shocked to report, other representatives of the supra-legal idle rich were snorting the ...”

“... the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister blackmailed because of his affair with a young man, had once seemed merely melodramatic – and hard to reconcile with more usual images of Sixties permissiveness. Now I can see why it is described as ‘crusading’. Today Old Compton Street in Soho is lined with gay bars, and in the Sixties, too, gay ...”

“... biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him profoundly: Trevelyan by urging the links between economy, society and politics; and ...”

“... birds and kit are wildly expensive. One of McManus’s interviewees, discussing the ennui felt by young people, says: ‘It is very difficult to just live here and do nothing.’ There is the option to leave, of course, but few Qataris take it. McManus meets a young man called Khalid who, unusually, spends much of his time ...”

“... for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in 1915? Did he read too much Edgar Allan Poe? It doesn’t really add up to very much. And yet – or therefore – the strong conviction ...”

“... in three periods of 14 generations apiece (not even Vermes knows why). He begins with Abraham and David and departs from ancient practice in naming five women in his list. One of these is Mary, the mother of Jesus. The others are all non-Jews, and three of them are associated with marital irregularities: Tamar seduced her father-in-law, Rahab was a ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

“... but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction. The first three books each provided a snapshot of a particular point in Patrick’s life: his miserable, abused childhood in Provence in Never Mind (1992); his miserable, heroin-addicted twenties in Bad ...”

“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... IDs up against the thick bulletproof glass for a soldier to inspect. On the other side, Amro, a young Danish woman and I walked down Shuhada Street, which was as ghostly and calm as ever, the shops sealed shut by military order more than a decade earlier, rust showing through the green paint on the collapsing metal awnings. ‘Let’s take the ...”

“... trust.One of the many politicians who sought validation through caricature was George Canning, a young gun of the Foxite Whigs who turned in 1792 to side with the Pitt ministry. Canning went out of his way to solicit recognition by Gillray in particular, advising a mutual friend, James Sneyd, to offer Gillray the use of his franking privilege for a heavy ...”