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“... Ionce​ witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... was safe. In fact, there were already rumours that all was not well, and stories circulated of young people with CJD. Late in the year the likely tally for 1995 deaths became known. It was well down. You can’t have an epidemic without bodies: the alarm subsided again. Ministers went on saying what they had always said: that the best scientific advice ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’ There ...”

“... a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not intrinsically more ‘real’. Time radiates in two directions, or ...”

“... not all that many years later the most right-wing, authoritarian home secretary in living memory. Stephen Pollard’s biography tells us what happened but it doesn’t quite tell us why. One of the reasons for Blunkett’s status in contemporary politics is that he was born into real hardship, a qualification which is much less common in the Labour Party than ...”

“... of bringing the wanderer back into the fold, and his mother urging him to join Mr Nicholson’s young men’s Bible class. During the summer he escaped to Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of his cousin Maud Babington, and there, in this impressionable mood, he fell passionately in love with the beautiful Frances Jane Sitwell – a woman ten years ...”

“... in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at last. But reading his letters in a new century makes the brave efforts at sexual enlightenment seem sadder than they once did, while ...”

“... Lindsay’s contribution to Declaration, an anthology of protest pieces by the so-called Angry Young Men. Coming back to Britain is, in many respects, like going back to the nursery. The outside world, the dangerous world, is shut away; its sounds muffled. Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of the Queen and her fairytale ...”

“... to set a page; a boy moistens paper to ensure it will hold ink; a printer tugs at a hand-press; a young man places the freshly printed sheets, still wet with ink, on a ceiling rack to dry; a young woman enters with a huge jug of beer (errors were often blamed on ‘printers’ wine’); and surveying it all is the master ...”

“... of Budapest. In 1988, Orbán was one of the founders of a dissident group called the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz). ‘Young’ was meant literally: nobody over 35 was allowed to join. Its members – mostly law students, mostly from the countryside – were libertarians who admired Margaret Thatcher. In ...”

“... were more than mass-hypnotic ephemera. I have to state an interest here: early on in my career a young director working on The South Bank Show who knew me made a film about my work. Bragg came to my house and interviewed me for the programme. But despite this connection, I’m still as surprised as any other long-term Bragg-watcher by quite how much I like ...”

“... and in eloquence, and introduced him into the court as sewer-extraordinary in 1516, aged 13. The young Wyatt had fortune on his side. He was handsome (‘there was no prettier man at court than he’), a virtuosic horseman, quick to pick up languages, and clever beyond all his contemporaries. He glittered. In his youth, according to George Wyatt, Thomas ...”

“... or indeed luckier, than Wren. While his uncle was in the Tower for recalcitrant royalism, the young scholar nevertheless got support from several of Cromwell’s kinsmen. The Lord Protector burst into one dinner to offer a deal for the prisoner’s release, and was in any case soon persuaded to help Wren himself to a prestigious professorship in ...”