“... her betrayal. In 1841, when Baudelaire was twenty, Aupick, deciding he’d had enough of the young poet’s wilfulness and insolence, arranged for him to take a sea voyage to Calcutta. Charles’s ‘aberrations had caused cruel anguish to his poor mother’, Aupick explained in a letter to a friend justifying the exile. But like Hamlet, Baudelaire ...”

“... happy to return the sentiment so long as it does not entail kissing and ‘that sort of thing’. Francis Cleveland’s affair with Barbara is much the most important of the three, because it is potentially adulterous and threatens the equilibrium of the little universe to which he and the other characters belong. Or so they all like to amuse themselves by ...”

“... figure in his forties. He explained that as a police chaplain he had come across a number of young people in detention and had offered them what he called ‘my spiritual services’. They had doubts, they had problems, they had fears, he said with the utmost gravity. When asked about their physical state, he said that he had only considered their ...”

“... Liverpool, where Forfar was docked. It was the last contact she would ever have with her troubled young husband. 22a Woodstock Gardens Liverpool Dear Molly This is the first time I had the opportunity to write. I couldn’t send anything as I promised because I got into some trouble and got my pay stopped. I haven’t had the price of smokes since I got ...”

“... of bad faith in best-sellers. His Spectator reviews lumped together Walpole, Priestley and Francis Brett Young (‘crude minds representing no more of contemporary life than is to be got in a holiday snapshot’), though he showed a rather touching solidarity with Priestley when the latter gave his famous wartime ...”

“... argued that to improve the health of the next generation it was vital to improve the health of young women and girls before they became pregnant. As early as 1986, in the Lancet, Barker suggested that those with poor nutrition as children were the least able to cope with an affluent diet in adulthood, and so were doubly disadvantaged. When Jean ...”

“... it had seemed unlikely that my father would remarry and even more so that the cousin would die so young. Jack offered to give Stars to my father, who refused it: in return, Jack undertook to pay for my education. As things turned out, this promise was not kept. Jack soon sold Stars (which became first a secretarial college and then a lunatic asylum before ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... who ‘was smaller in stature’. Now I come to think of it, though, that might interest an alien. Francis King, in his autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly, writes as straightforwardly as he has always done. Every so often in the course of his long career as a novelist critics have spoken of the detachment of his style, nearly all of them meaning it as a ...”

“... behind the arras. Bayley pays particular attention to those who ‘draw’ ale, like the hapless Francis at the Boar’s Head Tavern, torn between glamorous Prince Hal, who is detaining him with idle chatter, and Poins, who is calling again and again for more drink. This is boys’ play, too, and Francis hovers, crying ...”

“... In ‘How to Become a Publicist’, the liveliest story in Jessica Francis Kane’s first collection, Bending Heaven, a young woman moves to Manhattan to pursue a career in publishing, and as part of a family tradition: ‘All the women on my mother’s side have come to New York, lived, burned out, and eventually left ...”

“... have you forgotten your religion completely? [&c] What happened in the war? Melchior was too young to serve. His father was too old. When war broke out Melchior’s father shaved off his Franz Joseph moustache; that winter he began to grow sideburns. Later he grew a full beard, and was caught by his wife standing in front of a mirror with a portrait of ...”

“... breakdown in communication which makes it impossible for Greuze to introduce a normal, virile young man into the family groups of which he was so fond. Bryson keeps some of his greatest surprises for his chapter on David, an artist whom he profoundly admires and who cannot therefore be allowed to be ‘discursive’, as the implications of the argument ...”

“... house price booms and waves of gentrification have transformed it; her neighbours are now all young professionals or students. ‘Miss MacIvor?’ I shouted from the door, but there was no answer. Worn carpets, food stains on the skirting boards, a stale urine smell. I went through to the living room: she was sleeping on an easy chair in front of an ...”

“... Hawaiian home – whose grounds were a sort of Wonka Factory of psychoactive plants – that the young Merlin first learned that ‘humans can alter their minds by eating other organisms.’ McKenna speculated that psilocybin mushrooms lay at the root of human cultural development: it was consuming them which spurred the creation of art, culture, religion ...”