“... at their burrow doors on the turf above. I went out to the May this year to show the seabirds to a young friend, a student of Arctic biology. Anna was studying in Tromsø and had been on a research ship right up to the ice. She had witnessed polar bears hunting ringed seals, but she had never seen anything like the May. That was then.Highly pathogenic avian ...”

“... of response.’ There are complaints about critics, and the neglect of genius. Picasso, who is a young woman artist, reminds herself that ‘talent and application could pitch her in the Royal Academy, genius was certain to bar her from it.’ Sappho is the sternest lecturer. Winterson uses her to meditate on language, in swoony paragraphs. She promises us ...”

“... Milner, a great proconsul with the flair of the dangerous don for gathering around him a group of young men and converting them into disciples. Amery was the young intellectual with a First in Greats and a Fellowship at All Souls. Milner was the idol of the hour and the prophet and theorist of a new British Empire. The ...”

“... been delighted to show. The painting would seem a very grand but not unusual portrait of two smart young men of learned and artistic inclinations, were it not for three surprising items. At the front, looking like a guided missile about to hit the floor from somewhere off-right, is a grinning skull in very elongated perspective (‘anamorphic’ is the ...”

“... appointed governor of Virginia by Charles II. In the other column Francis laments the loss of his young wife, ‘dilectissima Philadelphia … Charissima, Desideratissima Conjunx’. The other cartouche monument lists the many virtues of ‘that Truly noble and Religious Lady Mary Howard’, wife of the 6th baron, which included ‘Charity to the ...”

“... was a secret homosexual, Nazi and murderer. Kaplan screamed at him: ‘Is it true you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?’ The strain of American politics that produced QAnon isn’t new. What is new is its having a spokesperson in the Oval Office.On 10 September 2001, Christopher Hitchens told an audience at the University of Washington that the ...”

“... and sleep in dormitories. Those who make it through the annual assessments compete at sixteen with young dancers around the world to attend the Upper School in Covent Garden. On graduation three years later they audition for classical dance companies from around the world: almost all say that their dream is to be accepted by the Royal Ballet.White Lodge alumni ...”

“... a fierce, authoritative denunciation of his audience: ‘Thou art the man!’ (II Samuel xii 7). Young Michael was brought up vaguely C of E (like both his parents) and did not feel that the potent Hebraic name of Nathan really belonged to him. He seems to feel that ‘race’ should be a subject for amusing fantasy, not to be taken seriously. Just at the ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... The young woman​ at the blockade was worried about the banner the Oaklanders brought, she told me, because she and her co-organisers had tried to be careful about messaging. But the words FUCK OFF GOOGLE in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans ...”

“... people there, you had a lot of people having a good time. You had old black men from the Delta and young cats dressed fit to kill. But the most impressive thing to me about Beale Street was that nobody got in anybody’s way – because every damn one of them wanted to be right there.That short ride along Beale Street turned out to be the most important ...”

“... a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her scrambles up the pyramids with another; the North African desert; Alexandria, Luxor, Damascus. The series, combined with some well-timed ...”

“... a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering his voice, and his role. He had decided to become a teacher. Auden taught full-time for five years, from 1930 to 1935, at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, not far from Glasgow, and at the ...”

“... to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to explore the response of ordinary people to economic and social change. In 1989, Vincent, Burnett and ...”

“... he did not expect a major war with anybody. ‘There are, so far, no symptoms,’ he assured the young women of Newnham in that year, ‘either of pause or regression in the onward movement which for more than a thousand years has been a characteristic of Western civilisation.’ As prophecy this is no worse and perhaps rather better than Lloyd George’s ...”