“... 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 ...”

“... at Wilton. Goscelin also relates the crisis three years after Edgar’s death, when his successor, Edward the Martyr, was killed. The nobility, Goscelin says, believed Edward’s half-brother, Æthelred, was tainted by the murder, and offered the throne to Edith, who refused it. Scholars have doubted this story, or suggested ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a man of letters.Mary Ellen’s first marriage, in January 1844, was to Eddy Nicolls, a gallant young naval officer. They moved to Ireland, where Nicolls was in command of HMS Dwarf, the first screw-propelled vessel in the Navy; the couple seem to have become acquainted through Peacock’s interest in steam navigation. Mary Ellen was soon pregnant, but in ...”

“... flank, with a derringer bulging in his pocket, is a detective called Pinkerton. The hulking young bodyguard with two conspicuous guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new President has ‘snuck in like some old ...”

“... camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of Scargill, fear of ...”

“... and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein that the Berensons, ‘although neither young, or fresh, or cubistic’, were missed in Florence. Berenson had in fact just left for a stay in Paris, where, Samuels tells us, ‘the social kaleidoscope ... displayed its usual glitter,’ and ‘the days passed ... in a dizzying but pleasurable ...”