“... that would most help to make her legal case for separation’. Whatever she told her lawyer, Stephen Lushington, it had a galvanising effect. From that point, he recalled, ‘I considered a reconciliation impossible.’ Whether it was the incest, the sodomy, adultery, drugs or Byron’s episodes of apparent near psychosis, it shook Lushington to the ...”

“... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...”

“... to others. And they stand in contrast to another group of beliefs held on the whole by the young – concerning the special Scottish contribution to bawdy songs, drunken conviviality, early class consciousness, hardiness and poverty. Items from both sets of belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of most of these books. Derick ...”

“... aristocratic, always about the business of raising himself and hiding himself, and, from a young age, brilliantly observing Britain from the top of his nose and the summit of Parnassus. From Blackpool in 1942: The best thing about this place is the potted shrimps one can buy for succour between performances! Not really a holiday attraction, of ...”

“... theory that creativity will flow if outside pressures are removed seems to work. Time is what the young need, and contact with their contemporaries as much as with great minds – which is just as well, because you have to have something pretty important to say to dare disturb one of the world’s great brains when it is thinking about the world’s deepest ...”

“... or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie.’ Cavell, whose own ‘odd education’ took place in part at the Berkeley cinemas where Kael worked as a programmer, put it in more positive terms: ‘To be drowning in the ...”

“... DVD of the firework night, it was still selling. Nobody remembered what happened after that. One young woman, a highly qualified lawyer, now working off-the-book for around €400 a month, recalled the only Olympic event she’d actually witnessed. ‘There were horses dancing. Very pretty.’ The story of the drug-cheat sprinters and their staged motorcycle ...”

“... narrative. Drawing on elements as disparate as Alexander Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales and Stephen Hecht’s scholarly paper ‘Tobacco Carcinogens, Their Biomarkers and Tobacco-Induced Cancer’, Red Plenty is a seamless pastiche. It takes the long view of Soviet history, although Spufford’s view is highly selective. Sputniks and cosmonauts go ...”

“... often unpredictable, as many traders discovered to their cost. When the American captain Gideon Young shipped two tonnes of the medicinal sea plants known as ‘squills’ to Brown & Ives in Rhode Island, the merchants could not sell them. Having paid the burdensome tariff levied on all such imports, Brown & Ives re-exported the plants that hadn’t already ...”

“... deep commonalty (or maybe a depressed commonalty) surviving below the Hanoverian consensus (Blake, Stephen Duck, the poet-labourer, who drowned himself in a fit of despondency). In a way, Lucas is most interesting about the poets in between these groups, the traitors or defeatists like Wordsworth or Tennyson. Both men, after all, had strong dialect interests ...”

“... on the undergraduate-and-general-reader market tapped with such undeserved commercial success by Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.2 As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt’s effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd’s generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography,3 into a cocked jester’s cap. The ploy of ...”

“... convulsed by war and ecological catastrophe. They will be among the saddest and least hopeful young people anywhere.Anger is a bad passion, and a rotten basis for choosing who governs. It is also a rational response to the state of things, to a rudderless and compromised executive. Sitting governments always say they are punished in local elections, as if ...”

“... and Bakalar’s evidence comes from impeccable professional sources. The Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, is a rare survivor from a generally lethal form of cancer. Chemotherapy induced in him ‘long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea’ which only smoking joints alleviated. Gould notes that he had never personally approved of ...”

“... experience, rendered possible by teamwork on the part of Science, Art and Labour. According to Stephen Haliday’s The Great Stink of London, published earlier this year, 827,000 persons used the water closets installed for the Great Exhibition, ‘many visitors no doubt experiencing the device for the first time’. How and why the authorities counted ...”

“... narrated by the corpse. ‘A Visit from Jesus’ is a moving fable, only six pages long, about a young woman who starts dating an older man. Deeply devout, she is visited in her prayers by Jesus (‘She floated up to heaven and he was there, seated in an armchair’), who warns her that her lover is a consumer of paedophiliac porn. She stabs him to ...”