“... This question has provoked intellectual disagreement for over a century, beginning in 1884 with Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius, continuing through the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...”

“... dramatised Harrison’s relations with younger scholars – notably, D.S. MacColl, R.A. Neil and Francis Cornford – as painful scenarios in which she was always the loser. Yet Harrison, too, was inclined to see herself as repeatedly betrayed and heartbroken. Beard is uncomfortable with her claims to victim status, and hurries over these unedifying ...”

“... the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize ...”

“... Halliwell fell in love with and married the baronet’s daughter. Thereafter Phillipps hated the young man implacably, and did all he could to damage him and his wife. Halliwell nevertheless went on with his work, much of which was of biographical importance. When Phillipps died in 1872, his son-in-law, to comply with the terms of the baronet’s ...”

“... captured loot worth five times England’s annual revenue, she knighted her favourite privateer, Francis Drake, on his main deck. Subsequent plans ‘to annoy the king of Spain’ involved giving aid to his Dutch and Portuguese enemies and, in December 1585, sending an expeditionary force to the Netherlands under the command of another favourite, the Earl of ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures ...”

“... longueurs. His detective is a marginal presence, cohabiting in Pooterish domesticity with a nice young man. Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the current ...”

“... autism to be rare, homogeneous and totally debilitating: a form of psychosis that afflicted young children, sealing them off permanently from normal, loving relations with others and the world. Autism was seen as outside the realm of regular human functioning. When Oliver Sacks read Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he ...”

“... sister of his own intended, the much more docile Edith. A startled Sara was introduced to her new young man as he returned, bedraggled and sunburned, from the tour of Wales – ‘a dreadful figure’, as she remembered, though admittedly ‘eloquent and clever’. And so Coleridge abandoned Cambridge and Southey Oxford, and they moved to Bristol, Southey’s ...”

“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... ways to compose a sentence’? – seek and ye shall find … You must – do you hear me, my young friend? – you must work harder than you do. I suspect you of being a bit of a loafer. Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim. You were born to be a poet: be one. Everything ...”

“... When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in spiritualism while her philandering husband went out to fix people’s Hotpoint twin-tubs, and she quite often spoke of people who had ‘crossed to the other side ...”

“... In​ 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety ...”