“... things. What is certain is that his visual acumen was already present, and was cultivated from a young age.Evans was around 12 when the family moved to Toledo, Ohio – his father had been hired by Willys-Overland, an automobile company – and he took it badly. Making the transition from imitation English pastoral life to the unsavoury realities of a tough ...”

“... Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War. ‘For reasons that we still cannot know for certain,’ Edward Said would lament, ‘Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming antisemitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the ...”

“... in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the Second World War, rather than ...”

“... dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The ...”

“... to Firbank, and associated with many artists and writers including Wilde, but to the innocent young woman it is a crowd of strangers. It was Joe Orton, one of a later generation to acclaim and emulate Firbank, who called him ‘the only impressionist in the English novel’ – a painterly analogy I wouldn’t want to press too far, though he surely ...”

“... in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and ...”

“... of writing the history of a war from the point of view of the veterans. Niellands lionises the young fliers, and sturdily sets aside complicating considerations such as international law – reminding us instead that ‘there was a war on.’ He does everything he can to minimise the difference – which Lindqvist on the contrary stresses – between ...”

“... sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the cricket, although he was not much good at games, being tiny, near blind behind his pebble glasses and afflicted with ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...”

“... realised the harm the footage had done and tracked down the cameraman who had taken the pictures, Edward Chikombo. His body was discovered some days later. These events brought about a change in tactics by Mugabe and Mbeki. Mbeki’s fundamental position was that, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF had to be maintained ...”

“... and papist, then the anti-papist but Catholic supreme head of the Church in England. His son Edward VI’s violently Catholic-burning Protestantism was replaced after his death while still a child by the violently Protestant-burning Catholicism of his half-sister Mary Tudor, who died childless (though married to the Spanish Catholic Philip II, some 30 ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... the story of how Merlin’s mother was visited in her convent by a being in the form of a handsome young man, who could appear and disappear at will. He is characterised, on the authority of Apuleius, as an incubus daemon, a spirit who is part-human, part-angelic (a neat compromise between two opposing views). But didn’t his fathering of Merlin contradict ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”