“... girls look less mad than trapped; they could be acting the part of one of Dickens’s wild, angry young women. Forbidden and shocking images proliferated. Pornographers found photography a lucrative medium (although there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album ...”

“... has been central to debates about the relations between intellectuals and the state since before young Werther got sorrowful; possibly ever since the play was adapted as Der bestrafte Brudermord soon after its first appearance. Certainly once Shakespeare was naturalised by the Schlegel-Tieck translation and others in the early 1800s as ‘the third German ...”

“... the spirit of the red carpet’. Dresses like these are no longer bought for marriageable young fillies to wear to country-house parties, in the old-fashioned, coming-out way. The contemporary ballgown is more often built to be displayed on a celebrity body in the harsh light of the global media marketplace (which perhaps explains why this show of ...”

“... or early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... The distressing fact of her wifedom is one of the central threads in Heroines: how will this young woman make sense of being a wife, and what sort of wife is she? And can she both be a wife and what she most longs to be – an artist, a writer, someone who speaks to the world and is heard? It may seem like an old-fashioned problem (of course she ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect it. Unsurprisingly, the character of ...”

“... Reign of Love’ – was replaced by that of ‘Bloody Bill’ Marsden, an outstanding sadist. The young Hogg, as Lewis puts it, ‘co-operated enthusiastically in Marsden’s disciplinary reforms’. What can that mean? That he flogged smaller boys with a passion rare even in that intensely homoerotic environment? And his only redeeming feature, his ...”

“... of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional history, provides the theme for David Runciman’s modestly titled but far-reaching book. Runciman’s study deals not with pluralism in its current, largely sociological, sense of ethnic, cultural, sexual and lifestyle diversity, but with pluralism in its early 20th-century political sense ...”

“... and bred in the settlements. This new generation draws inspiration from the ‘hilltop youth’, young people who responded to Sharon in October 1998 when, as foreign minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, he called on settlers to ‘grab’ hilltops in the parts of the West Bank from which he and Netanyahu had agreed to withdraw, as stipulated by ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew ...”

“... existed. That sentiment persisted until the 1967 war. Even two years after it, when the young Max Hastings visited Israel, he, like so many, was ‘thrilled by the brilliance of Israel’s military achievement’, as he said in his recent Leonard Stein lectures, in which he went on to describe his subsequent disillusionment. Tony Judt is now an ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... is not always invested where the paying public wants it most: in the decidedly mobile assets of young players. Prices have risen exponentially: for transfers, tickets, tacky merchandise. The combined salaries of Premiership players have doubled over the last four years to £96 million, but there is a huge gap between the richer and poorer clubs. Meanwhile ...”