“... publications go to die. London, once the City of Gallows, is now a red glow at twilight. Young women who fall for the temptation of a night in town, a showbiz party, face a silent carriage for the journey home; bruises earned fighting off the kind of men who insist on wearing riding boots in bed. The ‘bad’ Bembo cousin, Wilfred, reinvented as ...”

“... a series of ever further ranging intellectual explorations. Wells is praised as the Edward Gibbon of his day, and he is also celebrated for writing parodic fiction of Bakhtinian subtlety whose designs are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take the ...”

“... stretch out so lowd …/So that I truly thought all These/Came to see Shore [Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV] or Pericles.’ On the page, as well as the stage, Pericles flourished: there were six typically error-stuffed quartos by 1635 (the first, of 1609, spelled Marina’s name incorrectly on the title page, and muddled verse with prose), meaning Pericles ...”

“... his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal lack of success. Bacon had offended Elizabeth I by his opposition in Parliament to some of her financial demands and Essex was a tactless supplicant. In a well-intentioned but almost ...”

“... in Syria is in the low hundreds. The figure may be exaggerated, but it is still likely enough that young men from the UK who fail to find martyrdom in Syria will return to fight at home. Syria is now host to two al-Qaida-related organisations: the al-Nusra Front and alongside it (and sometimes in competition with it) the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham ...”

“... on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but rather wished that ...”

“... make good on at least some of the comparisons listed above. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young man from a poor Italian family who has moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. He had previously been seen as a boy in Wait until Spring, Bandini; he had also been the protagonist of the then unpublished The Road to Los Angeles, and was later to appear ...”

“... present in the early Sartor Resartus, lively and opaque by turns, a book which inspired the young and bewildered their elders. A devastating social critic over-impressed by heroes and dictators, Carlyle was humane and savage, radical and racist, an agnostic quoted by churchmen and praised as ‘a prophet in the midst of an untoward generation’ in Dean ...”

“... helped him become fluent in English and familiar with the Bible. Afterwards, like many ambitious young men, he joined the Brahmo Samaj movement. Its leaders followed the example of the revered Ram Mohun Roy in seeking to free the Brahmin elite from the trammels of caste observance. They claimed to have found in the Vedas an ancient monotheism that fused the ...”

“... in the remoter areas of Xinjiang, but fewer major incidents were reported until, in July 2009, young Uyghurs protesting against attacks on Uyghur workers in south China clashed with groups of Han residents in Ürümqi, which had escaped most of the violent conflict of the previous two decades. The Ürümqi Han demanded action from the Beijing ...”

“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... Preposterous dreams can seem reasonable when you’re young. ‘I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante ...”

“... of Rubio’s nomination had now been accepted as an article of faith by the pundits. Here was a young, slick, good-looking reactionary whose parents had fled Cuba. The themes of anti-communism, which somehow continue to animate US politics, were his birthright. Once the field was cleared of lesser lights like Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly ...”

“... a job with the British-run Egyptian postal service, and Nelly Grün, a cultured and attractive young woman from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews. Nelly was visiting her uncle as a reward for graduating from high school, ‘still a fairly unusual achievement for girls in central Europe’, her son would write more than seventy years later, using his ...”

“... in only four years: ‘The bodies, now mumia, had been those of slaves and other dead persons, young and old, male and female, which he had indiscriminately collected.’ In 1546 the German physician Leonhard Fuchs still regarded this new form of mummy as disreputable, complaining of ‘the gory matter of cadavers received evidently from the gallows or ...”