“... a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted ...”

“... admitted to several known unknowns in her counterfactual history, but was certain that ‘the young Elizabeth Stuart would have made an excellent queen, with her intelligence, charm and sense of ceremonial’ already evident, despite her being only nine years old when the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. Dramatic speculations irresistibly attach to the ...”

“... While 20th-century political and economic interests gave new priority to the Near East, young men like T.E. Lawrence and R. Allen Brown, whose university history had included the crusades by happenstance, fought in crusader territory and then went on to write the crusades into medieval history. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire brought the ...”

“... Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set ...”

“... present in the early Sartor Resartus, lively and opaque by turns, a book which inspired the young and bewildered their elders. A devastating social critic over-impressed by heroes and dictators, Carlyle was humane and savage, radical and racist, an agnostic quoted by churchmen and praised as ‘a prophet in the midst of an untoward generation’ in Dean ...”

“... for an evangelical missionary organisation, one of whose many purposes and functions was to train young people to spread the good news, organising them into small teams and sending them out among every nation, tribe and people in all Judea, to Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptise them in the name of the Father, the Son, and ...”

“... pure gold.’ Nevertheless, he orders his sidekicks to shoot her son Bailey, his wife, their two young children and their newborn baby. As gunfire sounds in the woods, the Grandmother cries: ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the ...”

“... used more broadly to contextualise European colonialism. In 2021 Emmanuel Macron told a group of young Algerians that he was ‘fascinated’ by Turkey’s success in persuading their country that the French were its ‘only colonisers’ – a reference to Ottoman rule over North Africa, which began in the 16th century. Historians were quick to ...”

“... him – when a letter of his was discovered in 1974, among the papers of Anthony Bacon (brother of Francis) at Lambeth Palace. It was written on 1 August 1593, two months after Marlowe’s death, and it shows Drury was closely involved in these events. He writes: There was a command laid on me lately to stay one Mr Bayns, which did use to resort unto ...”

“... of Labour Market Experience of Youth. Starting in 1979, this survey has been tracking about 12,500 young Americans, following not only their family background, education, employment, marriage and child-bearing, but measuring their IQ. This unique resource enables our authors to show that IQ is a fairly good predictor of many social variables – educational ...”

“... may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another dimension. Did Wells himself make some such jump into hyperdrive, becoming a prophet of the ...”

“... Britain. A related and even more influential theme was sounded by Darwin’s younger half-cousin, Francis Galton. After reading the Origin of Species, Galton concluded that human beings were still evolving like all other animal species, but that the most likely basis of future human evolution would be inherited intellectual and psychological ...”

“... understood. He is the first, I believe, to draw attention to some curious dealings between Captain Francis Austen and the directors of the East India Company and he notes that Austen’s career did not suffer thereby: yet he recognises that the Admiralty and the Company then cooperated in a manner that might later have been thought improper. He deals fairly ...”

“... end of history simply contribute another event to the history they declare over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only ...”

“... of a Bulgarian count whose recreation was to ride to hounds after a human quarry, preferably a young gypsy woman with a child at her breast. The hunt would end with the count coming to orgasm as he watched woman and baby being torn to pieces. Finally ‘everything was silent and the waters of the estuary turned carnation-red as the hounds ate their ...”