“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to locate the origins of social realism in the immediately postwar era of epithets when ‘angry young men’ were seen tearing it up at work and at home, more often than not without much regard to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told ...”

“... of a popular and oppositional British film culture. Indeed, its cast of gays, blacks and young characters made it seem a product of a hypothetical GLC film unit. Small wonder that Norman Stone bemoaned ‘the overall feeling of disgust and decay’ conveyed by the film and complained that Kureishi was inciting a ‘sleazy, sick hedonism’. Audiences ...”

“... Kidman in black velvet, or like Audrey Tautou, the latest face of Chanel No. 5, who also plays the young Coco Chanel in Anne Fontaine’s Coco before Chanel. So far as one can tell, Chanel was never fully contented (she boasted that she did not require ‘that daily dose of poison, recently invented, that we call happiness’ and her restless scissors were ...”

“... which is also used to describe the dancing girls at Solomon’s court, and simply means young and nubile. Jerome translates it as virgo, adding divine authority to the virulent cult of sexual disgust that shaped Christian moral theology (the Quran, free from this linguistic trap, does not connect Mariam/Mary’s miraculous nature with moral horror ...”

“... I did not respond to the call, but it reminded me of someone who did: Pavlik Morozov, the heroic young Soviet denouncer of the early 1930s whose legend is the subject of Catriona Kelly’s new book. Unfortunately in Pavlik’s case the suspicious person he dobbed in was his own father, and angry relatives took revenge by murdering him. Pavlik won a lasting ...”

“... Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in 1934. A young woman called Bonnie Parker was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed ...”

“... homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles epidemic. The suspects had been put on ‘death row’ by their fellow villagers, but were rescued by Enga’s deputy police commander, Epenes ...”

“... in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was arrested when about to board ship for France, and a sensationally seditious address was found in his pocket, welcoming a French invasion in support of British liberty. It led to a dramatic ‘state trial’ and there was much ...”

“... that imagined love among the prairie flowers between a lovely white squaw and a darkly handsome young buck. Her uncle James Parker, Rachel Plummer’s father, made nine or ten trips into Indian country, often by himself, over the next decade, determined to retrieve his daughter and other captured relatives, a quest that was eventually given Hollywood ...”

“... If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English … If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog … But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real ...”