“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”