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“... neoclassical architecture and limited palette give the scene an uncharacteristic austerity – the young guides’ mustard-yellow stockings are the only spots of colour – but the woman’s dress is too elaborate for museum-going and a cigar on the steps pointed in her direction signals a male presence beyond the frame. Ignoring her husband, she makes eyes at ...”

“... Ireland, with its mellifluous advice from ‘a very knowing American of my acquaintance … that a young healthy Child well Nursed is at a year Old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boyled.’ Was Swift deploring the voracity of landlords and their parliamentary backers, or offering a brutal fantasy at the ...”

“... years he has watched it all: enclosure, civil war, the church being built, civic organisation, young people getting killed far away, parish do-gooding, village expansion, razed hedges, rising house prices. To him Article 50 would be just a blip. He is ancient and forever young. All this is so unlike what you’d expect ...”

“... shepherds watching their flocks by night without running the risk of recalling, in mid-reading, Dudley Moore’s interview with Peter as Arthur Shepherd in Behind the Fridge: SHEPHERD: Er, basically, what happened was that me and the lads were abiding in the fields. REPORTER (writing): Abiding in the fields, yes. SHEPHERD: Yes. Mind you, I can’t ...”

“... taffeta and copper wire from a wreck of 1619 for Sir John, ‘of which,’ he wrote to his friend Dudley Carleton, ‘I desire not to be called to account.’ Decried as coast harpies and land monsters, salvagers were beneath contempt. The 17th-century preacher William Johnson inveighed against ‘the Countrey people enriching themselves with the losses of ...”

“... travels Scotland towards the end of his life, gauging morale and wondering what system could help young folk to flourish. Kenneth White, a Glaswegian based in Brittany and professor at the Sorbonne, is for ever wondering, as he walks the beaches of Western Europe, which place is home for him. Beveridge and Turnbull, ...”

“... about his origins as Cecil Smith from Camberwell. Forester had encouraged a younger writer, Dudley Pope, to make a play for his vast readership once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American publisher, J.B. Lippincott, decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance ...”

“... in Room at the Top, but more convivial and amused – an amiable shark. No one looks that eagerly young anymore. Two decades after his death, Tynan is still getting the star treatment, a rare thing for any writer; even rarer for a critic, whose work tends to date fast. The morbid, sexy idolatry usually reserved for rock stars, dead poets and suicide blondes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... along the street to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, passing on the way a covey of priests and earnest young laity en route for a pro-life demonstration. I feel sorry for these devout and less than butch youths (me, once), knowing the priests look down on them, while longing for sterner converts.At first the palazzo seems closed and we have to circumambulate the ...”

“... Altrincham have been nodes in Greater Manchester for decades now, but people in West Bromwich or Dudley, let alone Coventry or Wolverhampton, would blanch at being described as inhabitants of Greater Birmingham.Manchester today feels like the country’s second city in a way that Birmingham doesn’t, from the scale of its neo-Gothic architecture to its ...”

“... Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed ...”

“... details will be familiar to many from school history lessons. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, having overcome the doubts of some of his own commanders, marched south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical superiority of the Government ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of ...”