“... more to talk about. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to find a volume as solid and responsible as Edward Peters’s Torture, which traces the history of torture from the extraction of evidence from slave witnesses in criminal trials to the Inquisition, and on to its use, after a brief interruption, in our century as part of the ideological wars of ...”

“... from memory before meeting the agent. He did all this without ever arousing the suspicion of the young English theoretician with whom he shared an office for two years, nor that of any of his other colleagues. Back in England, he was appointed head of the theoretical division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, in which capacity he told ...”

“... was born in Croydon, to a maritime family (he shared this background with his distant admirer Edward Carpenter). His early years were given over to colonial journeyings that left him self-conscious and unhappy: there were two voyages to Australia, on the second of which, in 1875, he got his first job, as a minor teacher in somewhere called Sparkes ...”

“... of champagne, even on the high Amazon. The jacket of Travels with a Superior Person shows the young Curzon, resembling a more soigné young Churchill, standing proprietorially before the Pyramids. This is the man who postponed marriage to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a ...”

“... café I cared for. There were undergraduates I knew at whom Auden made passes, though I was still young and innocent enough to find a pass as remarkable as the person making it.When he died in 1973 his death seemed to me less a loss to poetry – the poetry was largely over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store ...”

“... It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.Boswell was plagued by venereal disease and thought his bouts were worse because ‘I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison ...”

“... but sure, to the Widow Bull’s victualling house in Deptford, where in spring 1593 four young men spent a day drinking wine in the garden. Mrs Bull’s house was not a tavern, nor was she a sort of Mistress Quickly, half-expecting a fight to break out as the sun declined. She was a bailiff’s widow, with some court connections; her house was a ...”

“... the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come from the rapture of the American young at the unfamiliar emotional and political power of coexisting in public together, body and soul. I have reconnected via Facebook to old friends who might otherwise never have resurfaced, and followed grassroots politics and movements. And I’ve wasted ...”

“... fell in love with their leading actresses, wrote their major works in six years and died young. More important, they both wrote plays about the impact on the present of the future; Ibsen’s great subject was the impact on the present of the past. In Chekhov’s first great play, The Seagull, the first three acts adumbrate hopes and ambitions that ...”

“... local girls with whom Bert – as he then was – became involved during his adolescence and young manhood were so homogeneous in their attitudes and fortunes that they provide a valuable chapter of social history. Jessie Chambers, Alice Dix, Louie Burrows, Agnes Holt, Helen Corke, and others who are less closely relevant, can, with regard to their ...”

“... which descends upon a decadent town. The narrator is one of a group of sporting, drinking young hedonists who call to mind, variously, yuppies and lager louts, Essex Men and the Bright Young Things of Waugh and Huxley and Eliot and Scott Fitzgerald. The narrator describes the night of the flood, his glimpse of the ...”

“... In a lawsuit brought in 1610 against the nuisance caused by a neighbour’s pigs, the great lawyer Edward Coke, employed in the defence, declared that ‘the building of the house for hogs was necessary for the sustenance of man and one ought not to have so delicate a nose that he cannot bear the smell of hogs.’ Later in the century, a religious writer ...”

“... of their superior social status in the world; or provocative and combative and rude like Randolph, Edward Stanley, Nigel Birch and others’) and it seems he is unwilling even to be a gentleman. He notes that Somerset Maugham said that Kipling was ‘not quite a gent’. When Kipling said of somebody, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought: ‘How I ...”

“... at a time when their own volatile love affair was still in progress. A clever and confident young woman, she managed to remain friendly with Violet Paget while maintaining her own independence. Ottoline Morrell’s correspondence shows that she heard a good deal at Il Palmerino in 1899 about its owner’s recent and savage falling-out with Bernard ...”

“... Liberal Party produced in such numbers. It’s also that so few real opportunities were open to a young woman with a head for politics in that era. There was the suffrage movement, of course, but the exalted martyrdom of the Pankhurst-led militants wouldn’t appeal to everyone, and a slightly older cabal of Newnham and Somerville graduates already had the ...”