“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... way from the marriage plot, which underwires so much literature. ‘It’s the story of life,’ Robert Sean Leonard’s character once explained on the TV show House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came ...”

“... these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes. He is part of a cell, or ‘family’, of drifting boys taken up by an old woman who goes by the name of Walt Whitman – whose poetry they ...”

“... Albert consulted the phrenologist about the upbringing of their children, he observed that the young prince’s ‘Amativeness is large and I suspect will soon give trouble’. Combe’s own amative region, he said, was small – he had not known the ‘wild freshness of morning’, even in his youth. Isabella’s bumps were against her: Love of ...”

“... can’t make out with him because if she did he might turn evil; a reader would have to be very young and/or very ignorant not to feel she had seen this sort of thing before. Didn’t something very much like it form the Big Bad – the major villain-arc – in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2? (Or am I merely showing my age by remembering a TV programme ...”

“... Jean Cocteau​ had a genius for being seen. As an elegant young man, with the cult poet Anna de Noailles on his arm, thanks to an introduction from Proust, he danced the polka at the Bastille Day ball in 1912, careful, first, to alert the photographers. ‘If I were to take a picture of a village wedding,’ a photographer once remarked, ‘Jean Cocteau would appear between the bride and groom ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic virtuoso’. And his mother Kathleen’s ‘intense ...”

“... going to the victory feast in Hall. Put on at the last moment, it was not well attended and John Young had invited half a dozen representatives of the lower tables to swell our party ... Roast duck and mulberry tart were the chief dishes and there was champagne. My place was third from the oriel window on the west side of the table between Holmes and ...”

“... listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office. He was undaunted by the fact that no ...”