“... 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 ...”

“... did little to alleviate inequality, even in Odinga’s political stronghold of Luo Nyanza. Many young Kenyans saw Odinga’s decision to enter President William Ruto’s ‘broad-based government’ in 2024, in exchange for Ruto’s endorsing his bid to become chair of the African Union Commission, as a betrayal. (Odinga later lost the AUC election to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”