“... at home in Rome, was as much concerned with compositional elegance as believability: in his Saint Michael and the Devil (1607), the saint props his knee on candyfloss clouds so delicate it’s hard to imagine them taking his weight. Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (1615-16), by contrast, part of a decorative ceiling in Florence commissioned by ...”

“... and drugs offences. 114 are serving life sentences, including Dennis Nilsen, who strangled 16 young men at his flat in North London. A year ago the paedophile, Leslie Bailey, was murdered in his cell. There is a greater concentration of high-security prisoners at Whitemoor than at any other jail in Britain. On Saturday, 10 September, the day after the ...”

“... more at home. ‘It is our gift,’ he said, ‘to have visions, and I want to share that of a young boy who wrote to me shortly after I took office.’ Over the years he has launched into hundreds of these anecdotes: the country, it seems, is filled with juvenile letter-writers, refugees from the Evil Empire, freedom-loving victims of the wicked ...”

“... Penny takes on Downton, and Knight’s activities as a collector and judge of ancient art; Michael Clarke assesses him as a connoisseur of paintings and drawings; Claudia Stumpf deals with the ‘Expedition into Sicily’ and Peter Funnell with the more general critical writings: A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, An Analytical Inquiry into the ...”

“... asked why they wanted to take my picture one of them emitted a little hissing laugh to himself. A young English assistant took us upstairs for lunch. On the way we passed a bank of slightly old-fashioned video screens with a control panel attached. I knew editing of the project was taking place in the building, but it wasn’t clear whether the screens were ...”

“... Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much ...”

“... police officers from the small town of Hull, Massachusetts, near Boston, arrived at the house of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled on the floor next to her teddy ...”

“... power far superior to that of any other English peer, and second only to the king’s. For the young Richard II, who was almost exactly of an age with his cousin, this was not a comfortable prospect. Mortimer believes that he was also jealous and resentful of Henry’s applauded manly accomplishments. Their relations, and Richard’s relations with ...”

“... physical and emotional violence that will have long-standing consequences for both of them, the young men have choices to make. Both have a chance to end the sequence of events that led them to this point: in other words, to flee. But neither does. ‘I believe that each decision made that evening,’ Louis writes in Histoire de la violence, ‘on my part ...”

“... Queen of Scots, or the gushing account of ‘this bewitching Princess’ at the centre of the young Jane Austen’s unstable parody The History of England. By a partial, ignorant – prejudiced Historian (1791). Lewis’s reading of the most compelling of these, Sophia Lee’s three-volume epistolary novel The Recess (1783-85), is the emotional core of ...”

“... show the superiority of the modern scientific and progressive order. So when D. van der Meulen, a young Dutch colonial official who was later to write a great deal about his voyages to the Hadhramaut, arrived in Jeddah in 1926, just after Ibn Saud’s troops had captured the city from the British-backed Hashemite ruler, his mission was ‘to take charge of ...”

“... identical with the school Stephen Dedalus attends in Dublin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There is something disingenuous, even mischievous, about this claim, since Buñuel’s religious preoccupations are clearly more firmly anchored than the remark suggests, more like a trauma than an option. But the intellectual reach of the idea is ...”

“... 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 broadcasts. But he saw that if he was going to be a ...”

“... possessing an imaginative life of their own. Ariès points out how Medieval artists portrayed the young Jesus as a small adult: they did not know how to illustrate childhood in any other way. From the studies so far published, it seems that only in the late 18th century did childhood come to seem important in itself; for some, it became an ideal upon which to ...”

“... Pandy, on the Welsh side of the Welsh border, became a political activist at 14, in 1935, when Michael Foot, just down from Oxford, was his local Labour candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal ...”