“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ventures and backed his campaigns for mayor of San Francisco and governor of California. In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom insists that though he grew up with the Gettys – sometimes living in their mansions and flying on their jet (the ‘Jetty’) – he was never one of them, and owes them no fealty. Political memoirists are usually coy about their ...”

“... 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 writings by Wittgenstein and about him, and his 1988 biography, reissued a few years ago as Young Ludwig, as well as being a fascinating account of Wittgenstein’s life up until 1921, also provides one of the best short introductions to the ideas and the style of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Wittgenstein in Cambridge, a beautifully produced ...”

“... his wife Katherine had no fewer than 12 children, though four of their daughters died tragically young in an epidemic which finally induced the family to forsake Arran. Their two younger sons deservedly get chapters to themselves in The Macmillans. Mr Daniel and Mr Alexander were the founders of the family firm. They made their way to London via ...”

“... with ease – a quality he admired in Romilly? Or was it his fear of death, so intense when he was young and conquered only when he came to die? Or was it some extension of his ego? All novelists are egoists who spin their characters from observing themselves as much as other people and choose subject-matter from their experience. But Philip Toynbee’s ego ...”

“... Dr Banfield cheers up, as well he might, when he gets to the newer generation of the 1920s, with young Willie Walton not fitting into the Prince Consort Road, and then with Benjamin Britten, who can be seen as the equivalent of the Thirties poets. The study (too long for its subject, but full of interesting insights) stops before English music was dragged ...”

“... of it. Bernal’s decision to make his career in England was nothing extraordinary. A promising young crystallographer might take the same decision just as easily today. The political rhetoric (whether Nationalist or Loyalist) according to which London and Dublin are conceived as ‘foreign powers’ is doubtless diplomatically correct. But I would guess ...”

“... As​ a young researcher applying for a US visa to go to a conference in the mid-1960s, I presented myself at the fortress-like embassy in Grosvenor Square and ticked the boxes affirming that I was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party and did not intend to attempt to overthrow the US government by force ...”

“... Strane with her therapist; she trusts that nobody else will understand. ‘It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him,’ she explains in a summary introduction that primes the reader for a lengthy statement of denial.Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could ...”