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“... are going to find the defining moment of their lives to have been the abuse they suffered while young, the act must necessarily, and invariably, be branded as criminal. Not long ago an American teacher was put in prison for seven years after she became pregnant for the second time by her teenage student; the second baby was born behind bars and is being ...”

“... Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini is an extended obeisance performed by a young Englishman before some marble panels in an Italian church. The panels were carved in the 1450s, mostly by a Florentine called Agostino di Duccio, who was working in Rimini for the local warlord. Three dozen illustrations punctuate Stokes’s reissued text of 1934 ...”

“... the head of them, and a saffron-robed, shaven-headed Oriental bringing up the rear, about thirty young men and women, dressed in rags, sandals, thongs, gauze, copper, feathers, ribbons, tank-tops, and other such finery, formed themselves up into processional order. Two or three were carrying pikes decorated with streamers on which mystic symbols were ...”

“... passion between the son and daughter of the prison governor. So intense are the emotions of these young people that the other inhabitants of the fortress – suspected heretics and political prisoners rotting away in its dungeons – are dismissed in a single sentence. The lovers enjoy five days and nights of violent happiness and then Anna’s brother, Don ...”

“... changes I have made are but an attempt to express better what I thought and felt when I was a very young man.’ Some thought this mere falsification, but he answered them thus: The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake. These lines were written in 1908, but the idea persisted ...”

“... be that a woman’s time tends to be cut into more. But mainly it’s just fashion and tradition. Young girls generally just don’t study chess seriously, as many boys do. The very few who do so have considerable success.A pocket book on chess isn’t the first place you’d look for an elegant nod to the effects of gender socialisation and the fragmentation ...”

“... who was getting married, was no secret; he broadcast the fact in frequent asides about fanciable young men or even small boys. But he had also begun to live a double life, sidelining his wife, Penelope Chetwode, a field marshal’s daughter (whom he nicknamed ‘Philth’) in favour of his mistress, the Hon. Elizabeth Cavendish, a duke’s sister ...”

“... characterisation in negative qualities: the selfishness of Rosamund Vincy, the priggishness of Stephen Dedalus. Woloch looks at the question of how living persons get ‘rendered into literary form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists ...”

“... hordes of the hungry’. (This prevalent and, in my view, productive tendency is characterised by Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that ‘the normal is constructed on the shifting sands of the aberrant.’) Pleij’s contention (which is perhaps more relevant to Holland than to other parts of medieval Europe) is that great quantities of meat were consumed by ...”

“... trying to conceal the fact from her strict Catholic family. Their marriage seems to have made the young poet restless and dissatisfied from the start: the baby was adopted at birth, but Barker had more difficulty detaching himself from his pious and devoted wife. By 1937 even Eliot was beginning to think Barker should get a steady job, and wrote cancelling ...”

“... each of the advances Laplace claimed. The leading London science lecturer and administrator Thomas Young denounced Laplace’s over-reliance on abstraction and his ignorance, or perhaps theft, of British achievements. ‘We complain also, on national grounds, of an unjustifiable want of candour . . . Mr Laplace may walk about and even dance, as much as he ...”

“... born in 1957 and has been unusually successful, commercially and critically, since she was quite young: she won a Seventeen competition while a teenager, and published her first book, the widely admired Self-Help – made up of stories written for her MFA dissertation – in 1985. Since then, she has published two more short-story collections, Like Life ...”

“... what he called the ‘latrine’ of Hollywood, Lorre’s place in the theatre world was eccentric. Stephen Youngkin’s reverent and scholarly new biography shows that the recurring themes of Lorre’s acting life were already set before he fled to Paris from Vienna in 1933: his distinctive mixture of comedy and creepiness, his struggle to avoid being ...”

“... at Grunwick in the 1970s, for instance, or the mass campaign to get justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence in the 1990s. It’s easy to single out the excesses of campus politics and go on to depict anti-racism as an elite project – or its opposite, a form of mob rule. It would be harder to do the same with, say, the campaign to ensure that the ...”

“... took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ‘seeks’ to keep it all ...”