“... didn’t seem to understand it. (She exempted from this charge only the radio producer and writer Andrew Salkey, who encouraged her work.) In Praise of Love and Children didn’t appear in print until 1996.In the late 1960s, Gilroy went back to teaching. She found London much changed, largely for the better: there were now many more children like her own, who ...”

“... bring about the actuarially predictable consequences. Fleming, who died at 56, was one of those. Andrew Lycett’s first-rate biography, published in 1995, almost doesn’t need its text, since the photos tell a perfectly clear story of how the (I hadn’t realised) strikingly beautiful young Fleming turned into a ...”

“... a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is given to the already over-exposed families of the ‘Souls’ and the ...”

“... Other European governments utter polite versions of the notion of good riddance, until the young and rebellious, all over Europe, instigate massive disruptions under the slogan Nous aussi, nous sommes ibériques. Meanwhile, in Spain and Portugal, the tourists have abandoned their cars and their belongings, the rich have taken their assets and ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... She shows how Mary became part of the court ceremonial of the Eastern Empire, no longer just a young Jewish girl but a queen, the patron of Constantinople, her milk-stained dress serving as the city’s protective relic. From the east, the image and worship of Mary spread through the Mediterranean. Black Madonnas were worshipped in the groves once sacred ...”

“... Alan Clark MP, and – apparently – various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports minister, exuder of brio, glamour and charisma, is an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of ...”

“... words even if guns weren’t involved) became a big issue in Sovietology in the 1970s. There were young people like me who had recently come into the academic field and thought they should be able to write about the Soviet Union the way they wrote about everything else – that is, as objectively as they could. And there were people like Robert Conquest, a ...”

“... it ... arose from a fundamental assumption of inferiority and superiority ... It was within the young hearts who contemplated this history that indignation burned, and it found resonance in the memories and secret, long-suppressed feelings of those who had endured it.’ Gillian Cowlishaw shows how anti-racist initiatives – schooling assistance, for ...”

“... shows that the Petherbridge figure is a woman named Henriette Metcalf, who is quoted in Andrew Field’s 1983 biography of Djuna Barnes, but whose real name could not at that time be revealed.) When her eight-year relationship with Thelma ended, Barnes flitted between New York, Paris and London, with spells in Devon at Hayford Hall, a house rented ...”

“... you can’t count on anything in any way!’ Maxim Maximych begins a ravishing tale about a young officer he met five years earlier, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, who is now dead. This Pechorin, transferred from Russia, seems to have had a demonic energy and a changeable temperament: he could spend all day hunting wild boar, yet another time might sit ...”

“... out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the 1840s, in ...”

“... political classes, still constrained by his origins in Arpinum, sixty miles south-east of Rome.Andrew Dyck’s giant volume begins there, with Cicero’s birth in 106 BC, and sticks relentlessly to biographical chronology. It is very much a life – the best in English since Elizabeth Rawson’s fifty years ago – not a life and times. The context of that ...”

“... normalising relations with the Gulf states. But the devastation of Gaza has aroused anger among young Arabs, and Arab governments that once saw Israel as a useful counterweight to Iran’s ambitions now feel that its aggression and adventurism know no limits. As Mohammed Baharoon, head of a research centre in Dubai, put it, ‘now the madman with a gun is ...”

“... of Hanson, an adviser to Cable & Wireless (of which the former Secretary of State for Trade, Lord Young, is head) and ICL, and a director of both Torrey Investments Inc. and the UK-Japan 2000 Group. Tom King became a director of the Electra Investment Trust after he had left his post as Defence Secretary. The Register of Members’ Interests for April 1994 ...”