“... mid-century decades of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the wars of Prussian expansion that David French picks up the story. It was evident to the more thoughtful that army and society were not well related to one another, and that the British army, which remained, to an alarming degree, a body apart, contrasted painfully with the efficient citizen ...”

“... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...”

“... to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the ...”

“... In 1894, the same year that the Children’s Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The Chosen One, in which the newborn and naked baby lies on the ground like a Christ Child in a Nativity painting, with a watch of winged spirits hovering a foot off the ground around him ...”

“... moved off campus. The audience at the rearranged event was, by German standards, unusually mixed: young people of various ethnicities, many of them wearing keffiyehs. In the Q&A, some spoke of being ‘traumatised’ by the violence of the rhetoric against them – and the violence of the police, who often beat up protesters at pro-Palestinian demonstrations ...”

“... Head. Thanks to its blacks London had an air of vibrant cosmopolitanism that attracted the young Wordsworth, for example, emerging from three years of blanched provincialism at Cambridge: Now homeward through the thickening hubbub ... The Hunter-Indian; Moors Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns. By the 19th ...”

“... You can leave Bill, but Bill never leaves you,’ one young Microsoft refugee in Douglas Coupland’s microserfs muses on hearing that the chairman has got married on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. It’s a believable sentiment, the lingering awe of an impressionable ex-employee towards his first real boss – and when your first boss is Bill Gates, personality cults die hard ...”

“... of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ‘proliferation of hordes of infants, children, youths and young men and women on the unpaved and unlit streets of the smoky, industrial “frontier” towns’ – frenetically expending what energy they could muster before life closed in on them. Things could only get better. Despite the forcefulness of Edwin Chadwick ...”

“... Liberal Party produced in such numbers. It’s also that so few real opportunities were open to a young woman with a head for politics in that era. There was the suffrage movement, of course, but the exalted martyrdom of the Pankhurst-led militants wouldn’t appeal to everyone, and a slightly older cabal of Newnham and Somerville graduates already had the ...”

“... The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the ...”

“... around with your festering discomforts and dissatisfactions.’ Sarah Talbot Jennings, the young Californian whose arrival in Bangkok opens The Glass Kingdom, can’t be lacking in imagination or she wouldn’t have made $200,000 by forging letters under the name April Laverty – the famous novelist she once worked for in New York. But Sarah has ...”

“... paying audience and breeders frequently charge around €3000 for a dress rehearsal. In the past, young men would jump into the ring in the hope of their talents being recognised. Domingo Dominguín – a member of the outlawed Spanish Communist Party and Luis Miguel’s older brother – came up with a new TV event in the 1960s called La Oportunidad in which ...”

“... for monumental mockery (‘This England’), the obituary which said plummily: ‘Any sketch of David Glass’s work would be incomplete without reference to his amour propre, the history of his subject.’ Over in America, I miss the Times obituaries more than anything else from the English public prints. The USA has no counterpart. The New York Times ...”

“... priggishness I dislike so intensely.’ Poets with whom she became involved – George Barker and David Gascoyne, for example – are sadly unrecognisable now as the vibrant young bucks she saw or imagined half a century ago. (She had a sharp eye, though, for dirty nails, mean and common facial expressions and weak ...”