“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Black Triangle.Pring’s book memorialises some of the lives lost. On a university visit, Stephen Carré buys ‘a large, beautiful bear’ for his older sister. Aged seven, Jodey Whiting brings a stray goat back to her grandmother’s house, insisting she wants to adopt it. Errol Graham works on his ‘prized black Mongoose mountain bike, building it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of money was shown by Quentin Matsys in The Money Changer and His Wife (1514), which depicts a young, smooth-faced woman distracted from her devotions to the Virgin by the glint of the coins her husband is busy weighing out. In his study of early modern genre painting in the city, Larry Silver cites a ballad from 1524:All the world used to be filled with ...”

“... boom. In 1982, post-secondary institutions did not need new humanities faculty because of all the young hirings they had made in the early Seventies. Today, there should be numerous vacancies arising from end-of-career retirement, but some 50 per cent of public, four-year institutions are currently imposing a hiring freeze on full-time faculty members, with a ...”

“... in which Posner is prepared to advocate a market in parental rights provided those traded are very young children who have not yet bonded. But non-monetary costs and benefits do shape institutions like marriage and cohabitation, especially when partners are freely chosen, and they go a long way in explaining resort to substitutes. The main merit of Posner’s ...”

“... already attracted to the dangerous sport of jousting – was surrounded by a dubious group of young bloods; and all this time Suffolk’s brother, Richard de la Pole, remained out of reach in Aachen. But Henry had done his work well and fate was kind to him: he died in April 1509; the more experienced councillors stitched up Empson and Dudley and managed ...”

“... affable front man for the Texas Rangers. ‘You know how it is with those Latin players,’ the young Bush told Sonny with his trademark smirk. ‘The first thing they do when they get that big contract, they go out and buy their wives a new set of titties.’ In another story, Fountain describes 1960s Southern hairdos as looking like ‘heavily shellacked ...”

“... the cosmic. It seems that Mr Levin’s life was changed by discovering Moby Dick. Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No ...”