“... was intended for them – a public seldom explicitly addressed in the novel. The year before, Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life, had purchased Lindisfarne Castle and commissioned his close friend Edwin Lutyens to adapt it as a retreat. The building was studiously modest, shorn of any obvious grandeur or pretensions to historical glamour, even ...”

“... were battered to death and she herself was so badly injured that she died within the year. His son Edward fought in the thick of the First World War and was badly wounded. His daughter Margaret died agonisingly of tubercular meningitis. His house burnt down. His wife Monica, a woman of spirit and intelligence, was physically delicate and the constant prey of ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... the equally great Count Fosco in the book but also such men of the readership as Swinburne and Edward Fitzgerald, who named his new boat after her. It was difficult for the Rhoda Nunns of fiction to follow her. But Marian Halcombe had no need to work. Though not rich herself, she was half-sister to an heiress. Rhoda Nunn has to work, and this gives ...”

“... behind the stereotypes of high criticism have been called into question. Sixty years ago G.M. Young wrote unselfconsciously about the ‘Victorian mind’ in his well-known Portrait of an Age, by which he really meant the mentality of its senior civil servants. Since then, historians have become more wary. Although they have continued to write about ...”

“... from Sotteville-lès-Rouen or Palavas-les-Flots. Droves of admiring postgraduates, like so many Young Raleighs, set out to comb obscure archives, and on their return delivered their reports from the front at Cobb’s Oxford seminar. The way to Richard’s heart would have been for one of us to work on his beloved Lille-Roubaix, whose Revolutionary archives ...”

“... could be more normal. The desire to escape, to travel, is deeply rooted in everyone, from the young runaway to the tourist, from the beatnik to the Sunday hiker. But suppose now that this desire to flee becomes an obsession, a truly irresistible compulsion. Suppose further that it all happens in a state of absence and you cannot remember any of it: you ...”

“... it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion ...”

“... like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific (‘the wrath of God’), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated. The race to identify the ultimate ...”

“... be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business.’ And even the saintly Edward Wilson, who once told Clements Markham that there was not a crevasse that he would not be prepared to fall through with Scott, warned Cherry-Garrard: ‘I know Scott intimately . . . I believe in him so firmly that I am often sorry when he lays himself ...”

“... chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a grammar school, which meant gathering a larger number of boys and making them sit still for even longer periods of time. When archaeologists excavated ...”

“... waiting-room entertaining enraged thoughts about assassinating the president? Or describing young Rasa’s erotic focus on the backsides of the men surrounding him during Friday prayers? Lit crit schools us to distinguish between an author and his oversharing narrator, but such distinctions are nearly always lost on the mullahs, presidents and ...”

“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

“... into perfecting the systems of surveillance.The IDF is always on the lookout for the hottest young talent, and seeks budding engineers in high schools all over the country, investing in pre-army courses and special education plans. The lucky few who get recruited by the cyber units are rewarded with guaranteed admission to the tech industry and can look ...”

“... map available was of Palestine. In 1856 the Salisbury Diocesan Training College, which prepared young women to teach in Anglican schools, gave them a lesson plan on the Dead Sea which warned of the danger of being overwhelmed by sand or the salty sea. This was more than a decade before the intrepid Thomas Cook organised the first package tour of the Holy ...”