“... municipal scallywags like Derek Hatton. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are all very well for the young, but the real pleasure of middle age is schadenfreude. Sometimes, when one looks back at the long line of Thatcher’s villains, one has to concede that, however much one disliked Thatcher’s triumphalism at the time, one could hardly wish the battle to ...”

“... teaching officers were without a college fellowship. So the former secretary of the Cabinet, Edward Bridges, was invited to examine what could be done. True to form, the colleges turned down his main, and the university his secondary, recommendation. Commensality means a lot to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five ...”

“... at that time, even more so for one from the depths of the country. St Ita’s was a place where young ladies visited museums in school hours, held classes in the garden and immersed themselves in Ireland’s Celtic culture. The girls there read Yeats and Synge as contemporary writers and steeped themselves in the myths and folklore of ancient Ireland. Above ...”

“... had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them what every reader wants to know: what happens after the book’s last page, or play’s last scene? It’s unusual to have so close a glimpse of the offstage author spinning consequences (and since Austen was only entertaining her ...”

“... her recently remarried father die, and to confront Wanda Fay, his obnoxious wife. Toward this young woman (a ‘ball of fluff’, as Helen McNeil calls her in a fine introduction to the novel, but hard as nails) Eudora Welty shows an unexpected hatred. The ‘scored and grimy’ breadboard Laurel rescues as she prepares to leave the ...”

“... was G.M. Trevelyan’s textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him ...”

“... strongly reminiscent of that child’s life of Raphael which made such an impression on the young Sartre. Here, for example, is Penrose’s description of Picasso and his father arriving in Barcelona in 1895: ‘The distinguished, middle-aged man, slightly stooping, had a look of disillusionment, a sad resignation, whereas the small heir to his fading ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... and there were those, when the Knox book appeared, who questioned its accuracy. An impertinent young priest called Warlock wrote to him: ‘Alas, I think that I am but one of many who feel that inaccuracies and the general tone of certain sections of your book have given its readers a wrong impression of Monsignor Knox as a priest, of his bishops and of ...”

“... bank of benches at one side of the space, it turned out that these figures were not as dead as the young male corpse in black, set apart from the others, might have feared or hoped. Selectively revived in turns by a sort of black mass (performed by a coven of witches evidently visiting from Dunsinane), the cast of Hamlet were compelled once more to enact the ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac ...”

“... a more or less steady influx of government cash. Within days of Sputnik’s launch in 1957, two young engineers at Johns Hopkins University were using the Russian satellite’s radio signal to plot and then predict its position. GPS came of age in the 1991 Gulf War. The US air force bought the first GPS-enabled missiles in 1988; new satellites were launched ...”

“... within months of each other in 1917; finally her unheroic, musical, stubborn little brother, Edward, was shot in the hills above Vicenza in June 1918. Brittain also returned to Oxford in 1919, ‘a ghost too dazed to feel the full fury of her own resentment’ as she put it. She found herself plagued by the illusion of a witch’s beard sprouting on her ...”

“... bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ...”

“... doesn’t discuss the Gaddafis themselves, but he does paint a picture of the world in which the young Gaddafi, until very recently, felt right at home. This is the world of ‘offshore’. Shaxson doesn’t limit the term to its technical meaning, as a simple description of the particular jurisdictions that enable people to eliminate their tax bills. He ...”