“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

“... novel, alternates between male and female dress and becomes a female husband to an effeminate young man. Asked to account for the book by the Paris police, Rachilde described it as a tale about a woman who sexually penetrates men, ‘noting that anything was possible with the help of technology’. They stopped wearing trousers after marrying Alfred ...”

“... work wouldn’t be the same without the patronage of John of Gaunt, or John Donne’s without Robert Drury. Given the sparseness of the documentation, it is particularly instructive to consider aspects of the creation of texts that are not what we would today think of as authorship. Watt looks at other ways in which women participated in writing, as with ...”

“... of the captives of Lebanon, the George Harrison of the hostage scene, the other one. The reporter Robert Fisk has confessed to him how he failed to follow up a dubious tip-off about where he was being kept in 1988. When Keenan was held hostage in Beirut journalists found themselves asking what the story was. I am not referring to the international news splash ...”

“... to many aspiring Ruskin scholars, is British, but his teaching has not been in a university. Robert Hewison, one of the driving forces behind the revival that dates from the foundation of the Ruskin Association in 1969, has always steered clear of an academic career. So has Tim Hilton, whose biography of Ruskin’s early years (published in 1985) offers ...”

“... Is ‘stranger’ nominal or adjectival? Does it refer to the new baby on the way, or to the young child so rapidly turning into someone unknown to his parents, or to the seemingly demure but menacing nanny hired to look after him? Or is it all a little stranger than that? What does ‘looking after’ mean? Are not the structures and vocabulary of ...”

“... the door has slammed shut. A moment’s reflection costs you your last chance to get seated. A young pioneer kid in a red tie (just like one we saw on television saluting to the standard Party call, ‘Young pioneers, to the struggle for the progress of the Communist Party cause, be ready!’) promptly makes for the ...”

“... writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in ...”

“... looked forward to royalism. They belonged, it was alleged, to a cocooned world. While the young Milton was getting the spiritual measure of the time and confronting its earnest issues, they wrote sycophantic court masques. While ship money and Anglican ceremonialism were provoking national discontent they promoted ethereal concepts of Platonic love ...”

“... poor but members of the skilled working class. Sailors tended to start their working lives young, even by 18th-century standards, and few of them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and ...”

“... recognised, Scotland’s smallness and relative poverty meant that it regularly lost ambitious young males to other societies even before the Union of Crowns in 1603. Infiltrating England’s overseas enterprises thereafter was at one level a natural extension of the earlier migrations of individual Scots to Russia, Poland, France, Scandinavia or the Low ...”

“... quest for a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male interference as reigning ...”

“... or perhaps, in the first instance, prints and reproductions – seem to have attracted him from a young age. When, in the early 1870s, Frick applied for a loan from a Pittsburgh bank, the partner who authorised it noted in his report: ‘Maybe a little too enthusiastic about pictures but not enough to hurt; knows his business down to the ground; advise making ...”

“... of India does anyone now remember? The heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls ...”

“... policy, healthily excited by the new, politically and socially aware, but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities ...”