“... within a straw’s breath of a vital part in her leg’). Couldn’t this account of a mishap on young Mrs and Mr Boddington’s wedding-tour have been merely an in-joke in her letter to her friend Harriet Carr rather than, as Jenny Uglow suggests, a Freudian symptom of premarital nervousness? Humour was certainly the Gaskells’ strong suit in ...”

“... of the land, by listening to the stories told about it. ‘I am a lexical cartographer,’ Jay Arthur writes. ‘I “map” through language, through the words that have accumulated about particular places. These “maps” are the conjunctions of the physical world and the imagination, a way of seeing a landscape, or, more precisely, a collection of ways ...”

“... myth in Greece,’ the Greek National Tourism Office urges us. This summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an anonymous columned temple hovers implausibly in the Aegean haze. Greece, it seems, has no history except ancient history. In Turkey, too, you can swim in the morning, and climb up to the theatre ...”

“... violence. I have a sense that for some hapless, underemployed and spiritually ill-schooled young Muslims, the Koran is a style accessory that goes hand in hand with martial arts training and watching videos of aeroplanes being blown up. On the other hand, there are those Western infidels, whose reading background is mostly in fiction, who pick up an ...”

“... can be seen to have ‘the precision of cooked spaghetti’. A more recent American aesthetician, Arthur Danto, is one of those who make the impossible claim that their experience of art is more valuable than any that could be derived from the ‘kitsch or sentimental outpourings’ which other people enjoy. Behind the claims, variously stated, for ‘high ...”

“... as early as 1940, when Chamberlain and the arch-appeasers were branded ‘the guilty men’ by a young Michael Foot and two other socialist polemicists. They overstated what was an arguable case, that the executors of appeasement’s closing phase had been arrogant, ignorant and insensitive; which naturally bred a counter-argument to the effect that they had ...”

“... As soon as they got back from their honeymoon Monroe told a friend, ‘I’m going to marry Arthur Miller,’ and eventually she did. She left DiMaggio when he beat her up after she’d filmed the scene in The Seven-Year Itch where her dress is blown up over her head as she stands on a subway grate. Yet, almost incredibly, DiMaggio does not come off ...”

“... in 1837, John Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and are covered with the handwritten revisions and instructions with which Constable besieged ...”

“... Teishi became an empress in 990, at the age of 14, when her father was appointed regent to the young emperor. But by the time Shonagon arrived, in 993, Teishi’s power was already in decline, along with her father’s; in 995 the regent died and two of Teishi’s brothers were exiled.This is the world that Shonagon writes from and ...”

“... distorted reflections of lacquered doors. I first met the hyacinthine, ringleted, foggyvoiced young Guibert through Foucault in 1983. He was perhaps Foucault’s best friend. Although Foucault liked working with women (Arlette Farge was a favourite), he didn’t like socialising with them; once I invited Susan Sontag to dinner and he hissed at me when she ...”

“... chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre ...”

“... business-savvy and cultured, and she smoked and drove a car; she was not only a very lovely young woman but a modern one. It was a love match, and it made perfect sense. Charlie sealed the deal when he had an ‘orange tree, heavy with fruit’ delivered to Hellen’s aunt, who had come to visit. As Hellen later put it, ‘No Southern woman could resist ...”

“... and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!’ He would write graceful follow-up letters: ‘It was very pleasant meeting you both and your charming daughter, and it is nice to know that Joyce had such good company in Zurich.’ Such a remark, Leader says with just a hint of ...”

“... When in his late teens and early twenties he began his career in London, people noted how ‘young and schoolboyish’ he was. His diaries from that time record enthusiasms for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing ...”

“... In​ 1957, in a remote village on the south coast of Bali, the young anthropologist Clifford Geertz was watching a cremation ceremony spill down a hillside when the crowd suddenly parted, ‘as in a DeMille movie’, and there, propped up on her walking stick, stood Margaret Mead. She was on her way to India for ‘a World Conference on some sort of World Problem’, and had tracked down Geertz and his wife on her ‘notoriously bad ankles ...”