“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tumultuous war years and his final breakdown. The narrator, Irvine, is a sympathetic but reserved young doctor charged with Gurney’s care. The novel’s delicate counterpoint of psychiatrist and war-damaged poet invites comparison with Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991). But whereas Barker was concerned with the immediate ethical dilemma of returning ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in this, and indeed any biography – its author. As Gordon Craig transformed theatre design, so Michael Holroyd in 1967 revolutionised the writing of biography with Lytton Strachey, which extended the biographer’s reach from the public to the private, from the work to the man, from the study to the bedroom. In doing so, he breached the border between the ...”

“... hundred thousand by the middle of the 16th century – and became wildly rich. This, in brief, is Michael Pye’s story of Antwerp’s ‘glory years’, a few fleeting decades when the city burned brightly as Europe’s most important commercial port.It had once been good to be a butcher. Now, it was better to be a merchant. Antwerp’s Beurs, which opened ...”

“... Policy Studies. These two books, by contrast, deal almost exclusively with Strachey’s politics. Michael Newman writes only briefly about Strachey’s private life, though he does reveal that young Charles Strachey, born at the height of his father’s revolutionary fervour, was promptly put down for Eton. Noel Thompson ...”

“... over his descendants and their spouses, a theme very valuable to dramatists, meant that in law a young husband and his wife were equal in subordination. The monastic urge to poverty and asceticism, conspicuous in some senatorial families in the fourth century, toned reconsideration of the senatorial concentration on the accumulation of wealth. Norse ...”

“... was first published, in Paris, in ‘the early Thirties’, according to its English translator, Michael Henry Heim. It appeared in the émigré journal Numbers and shortly thereafter as a book; fifty years of oblivion later, a copy turned up in a second-hand bookshop and was translated into French, bringing overdue fame to its ...”

“... important affinity’ between Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is likely that there ...”

“... and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in ...”