“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pevsner may well have read the Architectural Review and encountered the early offerings of the new young assistant editor and recent convert to Quakerism, John Betjeman. In 1933, Pevsner was back in England. Born a Jew (albeit, like his wife, a Lutheran convert), he had been dismissed from his post in Germany. Almost 32, with three children, he headed for ...”

“... The miscreant sprinted across the road and turned in at a gate towards the Golf Club. The young cop in pursuit was going well, and the last I saw of the chase was the cop throwing his helmet into the shrubbery the other side of the fence. I hope that, thus disencumbered, he caught his man. There was a don at Corpus Christi, Oxford named Grundy, of ...”

“... became canteen workers instead. Joe Gormley was, and is, firmly against the idea of any ‘modern young ladies’ trying to secure coal-face jobs. He was outraged by the women carrying coal in baskets on their heads whom he encountered on his visit to India in 1975. As one would hope, there are a number of fascinating fragments of social history in this ...”

“... dons in Pastors and Masters are distinctly unlike those conjured up by C.P. Snow; and the young Lambs, Staces, Clares and Sullivans wouldn’t readily hit it off with the Swallows, Amazons and Coots. In her novels this sort of realism has been virtually scrapped in the interest of perceptions and compulsions which are at once highly idiosyncratic and ...”

“... engagement photo, sexily swathed in the tight-laced clothing of 1885 and laying a hand on the young lion’s shoulder with an air of gentle possessiveness. Freud’s grouchy comment on a wedding anniversary was that it ‘hadn’t been a bad solution of the marriage problem’ (it would be an entirely Freudian-ironic joke if he had thereby concealed 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 ...”

“... out of which the building had triumphantly emerged showed the inevitable limitations of a young architect, leaving his drawing board and sketchbook for reality. It was Frank Newby, a superb (and generous) engineer, who made the untried concept of the lavishly glazed building actually work; it was the young Michael ...”

“... 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 ...”