“... Tory gents quite unrepresentative of the masses who played the game. McKibbin recounts how the young Tom Graveney (a Player) dared to congratulate David Sheppard (a Gentleman) on his century, and even called him ‘David’. Basil Allen, the Gloucestershire captain, rounded on Graveney – ‘He’s Mister Sheppard to you’ – and later called in at the ...”

“... that at first seemed inconsequential take on a menacing significance: one photograph shows a young Italian woman wearing a handmade black velvet dress she bought online – her grandmother swore her own mother was wearing that same dress when she was buried. There are photographs of a number of women who were buried in the Cimitero San Filippo and ...”

“... Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 hours after his statue fell than in the 125 years it stood in Bristol city centre. In south Mumbai, the ...”

“... and ‘five times the size of London’. Stephen Nichols starts his chapter by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly musical. The next chapter concerns Chaalis, a Cistercian ...”

“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... contains some of the words he liked to recycle. He would use the same ones in poem after poem: ‘young’, ‘sudden’, ‘keen’, ‘delicious’, ‘kiss’, ‘thrilling’, ‘sweet’, ‘stars’. The word ‘flowers’ turns up nearly fifty times in his first collection, Tulips & Chimneys, published in 1923. Some of his sonnets − this is one of ...”

“... The Hundred Years War served to strengthen, not weaken, the links across the Channel. First Edward III, then Henry V, attempted to establish an English empire to cover much the same area as the Angevin had done, or indeed, with the conquest of Paris, to swallow up the political heart of the realm of France as well. The influx of French hostages after ...”

“... may have started out raucous, but it gradually became more refined. The early theatres presented young women dressed only in flesh-coloured body stockings and one venue had to close when Wiry Sal danced the cancan with an enthusiasm deemed excessive by London County Council. Music halls offered easy pickings for rent boys and prostitutes and were denounced ...”

“... Halliwell fell in love with and married the baronet’s daughter. Thereafter Phillipps hated the young man implacably, and did all he could to damage him and his wife. Halliwell nevertheless went on with his work, much of which was of biographical importance. When Phillipps died in 1872, his son-in-law, to comply with the terms of the baronet’s ...”

“... insect replicating its structure, almost exactly, to produce a collection of tiny, near-identical young. Indeed, this is the marvel of nature, the characteristic that has, hitherto, been used to divide animate from inanimate forms. Modern biological thought has focused on four principal questions. What is the nature of the mechanism that enables the ...”

“... their importance, their originality and their elegance. Rabies has Louis Pasteur, smallpox has Edward Jenner. Who has heard of Peter Panum? Even the book about the institution where he spent most of his career, S.E. Stybe’s Copenhagen University: Five Hundred Years of Science and Scholarship (1979), while acknowledging his importance as a founder of ...”

“... his columns even make it to the mainland, though most of his readership is outside China. He looks young enough at 36 to be asked for ID when buying alcohol, but in the course of the book his name is suggested for a list of the hundred top Chinese public intellectuals published by a news website with the classically euphemistic name Harmonious Times. He is in ...”

“... records in 1898, ‘Went for a short ride up Maddingley road. Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees,’ the flash of hindsight tells us that this is the origin of a key episode in The Longest Journey; but in the moment of its happening whatever thoughts or feelings it stirred in him remain hidden. In the more revealing notebook diaries Forster ...”

“... seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank was quite a close friend of Forster’s, and undoubtedly called him ‘Morgan’; his book of course benefits greatly from his personal knowledge, but he was quite right to regard the familiarity implied by regular use of the first name as out ...”

“... here Gordimer forecloses any discussion by making the speaker a ludicrous cameo character – a young English journalist ‘in a catfish-patterned dashiki’, whose motives for bringing up the subject of ANC detention camps are suspect. Gordimer’s books often unstitch their own politics in this way and, as derision of one thing becomes extenuation of ...”