“... recompense was vast.I need to declare an interest here: a coming to terms with my own past. As a child of the German Jewish diaspora I lived in some intimacy with the Wiedergutmachung, the German reparations. There was a lot of talk in my family and among our friends about finding documents that would establish eligibility and prove damages; there was a lot ...”

“... According​ to one of her cousins, Mary Flannery O’Connor was ‘a very peculiar child’. When she was six, she drew countless pictures of chickens. To discourage classmates from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes take castor oil sandwiches to school. Her own recollection of herself is characteristically acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex ...”

“... and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression is that the book is written with justice. Many of their witnesses are still very much alive. The book – which in certain passages could be mistaken for a compendium of old gossip – has aroused controversy of ...”

“... Rye, she would grit her teeth at me and give her confidence to the black cook. I would find my own child become a mad little animal.’ Confidence is again at issue in another story, ‘The Scoutmaster’: ‘she was one of the few young girls who never – Never once! Aunt Grace could vouch for it. She had the girl’s confidence – never stepped outside the ...”

“... in the Sick-Room was written and the ‘youthful vanity’ with which the ailing and ‘pious’ child had anticipated her swift translation to heaven (‘I hoped for, and expected early death till it was too late to die early’), the Autobiography, too, owed its existence to Martineau’s belief that she was about to die. Convinced that she was ‘again ...”

“... written and read into existence. Social categories are important in Pamela – the heroine is a child of the worthy but impecunious lower class who has become a servant to the gentry, and when she exchanges the finery of a lady’s maid for the drab of a country girl for a trip home, she appears to those around her ‘a Stranger’, and is to her master a ...”

“... by having the main character in both movies called Brandon. In the Valley of Elah centres on Tommy Lee Jones as a father, himself a Vietnam War veteran, looking for his son, who has gone missing after a tour of duty in Iraq. What he discovers is the pathology of an army lost in the world, unable to explain to itself its rage or its failures. Redacted is even ...”

“... reminded her, she says, of crossing the border after visiting relatives in Northern Ireland as a child. Her mother had risked a contraband packet of tea, which the customs man found at first touch. ‘How well I put my hand on it!’ he said, though he let them keep it: a poor widow and her daughter, who would grow up so honest she was uneasy when I made ...”

“... from a tree near Woolsthorpe to the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. When Mach was still a child, it had been concluded on the strength of Newton’s laws that there must be an as yet unseen planet in the solar system, its presence deduced from subtle wobbles in the orbit of Uranus. In 1846, the discovery of Neptune was celebrated across Europe as one ...”

“... member who could legitimise their forays into Black music, and Innervision came up with Dee C. Lee, later a solo artist and member of the Style Council. Deon Estus, a dreadlocked Detroit-born bassist who had studied with James Jamerson of Motown’s Funk Brothers and had recently toured Europe with Marvin Gaye, also joined the band. (In Gavin’s ...”

“... of the Past’, written in 1939, which evokes in absorbing detail the early life of a child of well-to-do parents, ‘born into a very communicative, literate, letter-writing, visiting, articulate late-19th-century world’. Most of the time, Woolf maintains, we exist enveloped in a kind of ‘nondescript cotton wool’. ‘One walks, eats, sees ...”

“... do. Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.There are deeper disagreements ...”

“... the son of a diplomat, he grew up bilingually in Washington, and has taught at Harvard. As a child, he has said, Mexico seemed to him a non-existent country, an invention of his father’s imagination. It was not until the age of 16 that he went to live in Mexico City; later he chose to write in Spanish because, he has stated, there was ‘much more ...”

“... quoits, a mouth harp, a bone pointer or stylus, amber beads and a milk tooth belonging to a child between the ages of nine and twelve, undecayed but worn from grinding. Some finds, such as coins and pottery, could be dated with a degree of precision. But others, apparently originating on one side of the Reformation or the other, resisted ...”

“... of wide learning who amassed one of the finest private libraries in the country. Born the fifth child of seven, the young Michael grew up among a veritable forest of Foots, all passionately committed to the Liberal verities in a household where a radical Whig sense of history, literature and rhetoric was not just part of the furniture but pretty much what ...”