“... and on ours (with Dumas we know which side we’re on) Monte Cristo or D’Artagnan – the young, four-square, innocent victims of plotters who grind personal or political axes. When attacked, they defend themselves with wit and blade as they dash from adventure to setback, from treachery to fightback, until they reach a crisis which is resolved by a ...”

“... around this table.’ Here, then, is a society in which being over two hundred years old makes you young. But calling these states ‘old’ barely seems to do them justice. They are practically indestructible, outlasting anything that mere mortal men can do to them. ‘Vive la France immortelle!’ the French press declared the day after Paris was liberated ...”

“... the Instruction of the Over-Educated (and indeed his Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, on which he was challenged during his first trial), John Tanner’s ‘Maxims of Revolutionists’ are essentially paradoxical aphorisms, as so many of Shaw’s characters are paradoxical aphorisms embodied, and as ‘Don Juan in Hell’ (in which an ...”

“... as a result of the voluntary clearance carried out by Mrs Gereth. The empty spaces provoke in both young women a radical disillusionment about things. Fleda goes on to characterise Mrs Gereth as a ‘shipwrecked woman’ whose ‘small salvage’ at Ricks is mere stuff. The reason for her relative immunity to fetishism is made plain when she leaves Mrs Gereth ...”

“... wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, loved him. But perhaps it was because her two older sons had died young, one in infancy and the other fighting for Italian independence in 1831.Edward Shawcross’s new biography is in many ways an attempt to rescue the reputation of a man he calls the ‘people’s emperor’. It reappraises Napoleon III’s many ...”

“... called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She collected Classic Comics. The family moved to Southern California, and she grew more desperate to get away. ‘I believe … that the only difference between human beings is intelligence,’ she ...”

“... satires, to the detriment of consideration of the lyrics on which his reputation used to rest. David Trotter, for instance, shows how the concomitants of satire – wit, swearing, the language of abuse – all became identified for the Latitudinarians with enmity to Reason. Pat Rogers compares ‘An Allusion to Horace’ to its Latin source and provides a ...”

“... Tom Mboya? Kenya had emerged from the anti-colonial struggle with two leaders of world renown, one young, dynamic and immensely talented, the other old (no one was quite sure how old) and respected as much for what he had suffered as for what he had done: a mythical figure who until recently had been cut off from all political and virtually all social life by ...”

“... and petitions had yielded some positive results, the gains were too slow and too meagre for young people who had grown up believing in the ideals trumpeted by American leaders in the postwar period. Lewis and his peers wanted ‘Freedom Now!’ – freedom from the limitations imposed on their parents and freedom to share fully in the possibilities ...”

“... the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave Blair a cool £10,000 to nurture Young Labour and pay for the Youth Rally in Blackpool; it was the same McGee who presented Blair with the band’s platinum disk, and gave the now legendary riposte to Virginia Bottomley when invited to a bash for executives of the music business: ‘I refuse to ...”

“... and monogamy’. Strange they haven’t found the gene for smugness yet. Not to be outdone is David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose new book, The Dangerous Passion, is about jealousy, and why it’s ‘as necessary as love or sex’. His acknowledgments ...”

“... core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time. Such, at any rate, is the theme of David Reisman’s two volumes of intellectual biography and analysis – the most careful and thought-provoking exegesis yet to appear. Crosland was a man of contradictions, as Reisman shows, a hedonist who was also a puritan, and so on. Perhaps the biggest ...”

“... of Ragnar Lothbrok’, in the other camp ‘lay a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more ...”

“... unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... in the first 20 volumes, published in 1912, was to remedy the failure of schools to teach the young enough Latin or Greek ‘to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich’; the ‘average reader’, he said, therefore now needed help. Whether the top-heavy prose (or risible ...”