“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... licking oatmeal dust from the floor or seen the thatch begin to burn above their heads while the young men were still overseas with the Duchess’s regiment. But it is a strength and a tonic when a person of talent from another culture sets down the unveiled facts. People in the Highlands now say, ‘This is all new – we never had anything like this ...”

“... The Old James, in order to feel at one with himself, had to believe, at some level, that Young James had merely slipped in technique but had really meant what the Old James meant. Horne does not pay much attention to works outside James’s own oeuvre as they might have had an influence on this undertaking, and on James’s writing: there is a ...”

“... comedy of ‘The Secret Sharer’. Conrad, who used on occasion to vie with his friend and agent Edward Garnett in yarn-spinning, told him that his tale ‘between you and me, is it ... every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck.’ The sense of fitness was what most impressed D.H. Lawrence, who observed of one of the ...”

“... policy by the Treasury Committee led to increasingly strained relations between Mr (now Sir) Edward du Cann, the committee’s chairman and a champion of the new system, and Sir Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor. In turn, this affected the way the committee’s reports were received by MPs and led to semi-public rumblings among senior Tories about a possible ...”

“... time, the less love is to be found in the family, and the more brutal the treatment of children. Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family (1975), now read in many European countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the London Hospital which, in 1884, brought the Elephant Man to the attention of the bright young consulting surgeon. A year and a half later, having been shipped back from Belgium by a showman who had first robbed him of his fifty pounds’ savings, Merrick cowered before the sensation-seeking crowd that cornered him in the third-class waiting-room at ...”

“... De Profundis where Wilde anticipates that particular form of English sensibility which belongs to Edward Thomas, the Georgian poets and the early Lawrence: We call ourselves a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that Water can cleanse, and Fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Labour Market Experience of Youth. Starting in 1979, this survey has been tracking about 12,500 young Americans, following not only their family background, education, employment, marriage and child-bearing, but measuring their IQ. This unique resource enables our authors to show that IQ is a fairly good predictor of many social variables – educational ...”