“... 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 ...”

“... a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has recently been reformed by the Young Turks. In 1908 their revolution allowed the emergence of political parties, instituted elections and ordained a new pluralist order whereby non-Muslim subjects were elevated into full citizens, who might serve in the armed forces as officers of any ...”

“... its arid scholastic discussion of assurance of salvation and the visibility of the elect. Young poets like Richard Crashawe (and Andrew Marvell for a short time) swung to an emotional Popery, others to the half-way house of the Laudian ‘beauty of holiness’. Liberal intellectuals like John Hales and William ...”

“... activity surrounding live performances and dance clubs also has an impact on the economy, as young people juggle their Giros to ensure a Saturday night out. The other lunchtime I heard a Portishead song being played in Spud-U-Like, and every weekend since 1988 motorway service stations on the M6 and M62 have been haunted by clubbers who spend the nights ...”

“... including the Natural History of Wiltshire; A Perambulation of Surrey; An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen; notes towards a never written play called ‘The Countrey Revell’, based on his drunk Wiltshire neighbours; a collection of handwriting samples, to help detect forgeries; and Brief Lives, a riveting experiment in biography seen by his peers as ...”

“... the quantities of the seasonings were wrong – no quantities are given in Apicius, so I consulted Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger’s Classical Cookbook (1996) – but whatever the amount, the food would have seemed weird to our untrained stomachs. The later Romans, we thought, as we gargled with fizzy water to take the taste away, must have had very odd ...”

“... is) a wonderful grandstand. The land feels eager to be eroded all over New Zealand. Charles Andrew Cotton, a local pioneer of geomorphology could illustrate most generalities of what erosion does to landforms with native examples. All my New Zealand years I lived at 13 Pitt Street with my parents and sisters. (As you walk down, the odd numbers are on ...”

“... which, however, he has ‘moved on’ with great speed); he saw no difficulty with Andrew Lansley’s health legislation until first the medical professions, then his party, cut up rough; he has acquiesced in educational proposals that will do nothing to promote his stated aim of social mobility (quite the reverse); and he has apparently ...”

“... Do we think of it as a work of sublime simplicity or semi-autistic blankness (I overheard a young man dismiss it with contempt as ‘an accountant’s wildest dream’)? Is it a call to contemplation or the occasion for a cursory glance before moving on? Four works from Agnes Martin’s ‘On a Clear Day’ (1973), a series of thirty Expressionist ...”

“... who are benefiting from the boom and those whom prosperity has passed by. Putnam focuses on two young people, one from each side of the tracks. Andrew is the son of Patty and Earl, who run a construction business. He has security and access to resources; he has made it to college, and can plan his future with ...”