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“... or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion or ideology. Which put the young of the Fifties at a disadvantage, especially as they were so small a generation. ‘There were so few of you,’ one of Sayre’s professors recalled nostalgically in 1969, the year of the Harvard strike, ‘it was easy to push you around.’ No wonder ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whose teenage years had been overshadowed by the First World War. ‘We strain every nerve to keep young,’ Nicky says. ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ his fiancée replies. ‘It probably only means we shan’t live so long.’ The dialogue sets the underlying terrors bouncing off a brightly flippant surface, making no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... too far: as he rounds up her livestock in payment of a claim, she grabs his cloak and her two young sons, nobodies with no money or power, wound him mortally. Everywhere else in Europe they would all have swung on a gibbet. In Iceland they got off with losing their farm; but Einarr didn’t get it (they’d lost it already) – the gothar in general must ...”

“... mistrust politicians when they eat with literary men,’ he wrote in 1896, after dining under Arthur Balfour’s chairmanship. Though fascinated by power he was seldom at ease with the powerful. At 22 he had written that, although the Viceroy had been ‘awfully sweet’ when the Saturday Review praised Plain Tales from the Hills, ‘Simla always makes me ...”

“... never lose it and will spread these ideas as they grow up.’ Fisher maintained. This catch-them-young strategy was perhaps too simple. One thing it did not explain was why so many economic liberals were actually converts from left-wing beliefs, which they had maintained in their youth with all the zeal which, belatedly transmuted, turned them into ...”

“... he can recruit any socialist with a declared belief in Christianity, including Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury and Harold Wilson, and any Christian who has advocated a social role for Christianity – a rubric which would not exclude most modern Popes. If Bryant’s history had been less provincial it might have situated the ‘left ...”

“... has not annihilated consequence. Or, more precisely, that Aids has reinstated it. Suppose that a young man who knows he is carrying the HIV virus has some sinister reason for sweet-talking the object of his desire into going to bed with him while saying nothing about his medical condition. It would be quite appropriate to call a case of this sort a ...”

“... to a basic fabric. Sometimes it is useful, as in the painfully acquired lettering which enabled a young girl to mark the ownership of goods. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous pieces of handwork, the embroidered arms of the alliance which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in ...”

“... plays do survive – Thomas Drue’s The Duchess of Suffolk, Davenport’s King John and Matilda, Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser, or Glapthorne’s Albertus Wallerstein – and others preserve a sketchy existence through the records of censorship and prosecution. Massinger causes Miss Heinemann some difficulty. She (rightly) contrasts the fundamentally ...”

“... he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman compounded equally of beauty, vulgarity and spite, has fallen on hard times. He has lost his healing gifts, is living alone in a Notting Hill basement, and working as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon ...”