“... 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 ...”

“... but its underlying worldview is distinctly modern. AiG promotes a school of thought known as ‘Young Earth creationism’, which was popularised by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961). Unlike ‘Old Earth creationists’ or ‘intelligent design’ theorists, who diverge from the biblical account of Creation in six days but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and you shouldn’t either. We’re only trying to inject a bit of fun into the game and get the young more interested’ – though this has never been a problem in South Asia or Australia. There is, of course, lots of money to be made. Most cricketers are underpaid, and I’m in favour of their being paid more, not least because it would reduce the ...”