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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thinking that the party is less religious than its Christian Democrat counterparts’. Ken Young uses his unrivalled knowledge of municipal politics, especially in London, to expose some of the imperatives which have driven policy in this important field of democratic self-government. He shows how, before the Second World War, it was the Conservatives ...”

“... more at home. ‘It is our gift,’ he said, ‘to have visions, and I want to share that of a young boy who wrote to me shortly after I took office.’ Over the years he has launched into hundreds of these anecdotes: the country, it seems, is filled with juvenile letter-writers, refugees from the Evil Empire, freedom-loving victims of the wicked ...”

“... associate with Sydney Kentridge and they are likely to say the Steve Biko inquest. Biko was the young leader of the Black Consciousness movement who in 1977 was tortured and beaten to death over a period of days by members of the South African security police who then, with the connivance of police doctors, lied their way through the inquest conducted by ...”

“... awkward and excessively serious man to talk easily and flirtatiously, if polysyllabically, with young women. In this period it was almost de rigueur to cast erotic affections as platonic romances, in which lovers with Greekish names relished each other’s virtue in a way that now looks suspiciously unerotic. Evelyn seems genuinely to have attempted to live ...”

“... published post-humously in 1996, that ‘in an incautious moment’ he had promised his young wife that he would produce ‘one more collage, a book no less, on the topic of reality’. He stopped work in November 1993 when he became ill, and died soon afterwards, at the age of seventy. So now we have even more of a collage than he intended. Half ...”

“... from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three years earlier, during a visit to Cambridge, he had posed the puzzle which started Newton on the path to his Principia. What is the orbit of a planet under the influence of an attractive force ...”

“... Bucky’s great-aunt Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalist and feminist.)† Though near-sighted, young Bucky loved to sail and invented a new kind of oar. His childhood hero was Robin Hood, perhaps because his father’s death had impoverished the family. When he reached Harvard, he was snubbed by his wealthier classmates, cut classes, squandered his ...”

“... figure in the region was a shady American called Minor Cooper Keith (1848-1929), who together with Andrew Preston had founded the United Fruit Company in 1899 and proceeded to buy up huge tracts of land in the Caribbean. By 1927, his company was exporting ten million bunches of bananas a year from Santa Marta, the railhead that lay at the other end of the ...”

“... delay ferment memory and old jottings with an element of invention – or at least imagination. As Andrew O’Hagan wrote (in the LRB of 25 September 2008), ‘his fictional powers only reached full flourish when he wasn’t writing novels.’ Take Naples ’44, which many readers (including me) think was his masterpiece. An account of his service as an ...”

“... is very unlikely to be a result of chance. For Fowler this suggests not only the identity of the young man, but that Shakespeare was our greatest anagrammatist as well as our greatest poet. I can reveal in these pages for the first time a more remarkable truth: that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were addressed not to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, but to ...”

“... contest within the BBC had been between the guardians of the Reithian heritage and provocative young producers in drama and satire who sought to turn the BBC into a site of political and cultural opposition. During most of that time, there was a fragile armistice – even sometimes an alliance – between satirists, drama producers and documentary makers ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port ...”