“... of particular interest to anyone curious about the first British settlement of Australia, for as Robert Hughes and others have so forcefully reminded us, the closing-off of the North American market for felons after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to ...”

“... had a Macaulayesque brio and readability denied to Sparrow and his cronies. He had also, as a young socialist, and a supporter of the Churchill view of foreign affairs in the Thirties, written a damning book called All Souls and Appeasement, in which he exposed the damage done by this quasiacademic dining club when figures such as Lord Halifax and Cosmo ...”

“... imagery and the often thrilling beauty of his language earned him reviews unequalled for one so young – no one thought that Byron’s and Shelley’s juvenilia promised as much as this. Take Lenora’s speech after her daughter’s murder:                                          It is the morning, And she has ...”

“... rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The young Babbage was a good mathematician by international standards, at a time (the 1810s) when English maths was generally backward. He conceived his first calculating-machine in 1821, when he was 30. Thereafter he did no interesting work in mathematics, not even ...”

“... clergyman, he was indoctrinated in childhood in the crudest form of Evangelical belief. As a young don at Oxford, he came under the influence of Newman, and all but went over to Rome; but at the last moment he recoiled, reacting so violently in the opposite direction that, though he was a clergyman and became the head of his college, he virtually lost ...”

“... As a young man working for Lord Beaver-brook’s broadsheet Daily Express, I used to have a highly pleasurable daydream in which the coincidence of my name being the same as my employer’s led to some confusion among the company lawyers, with the result that I became the proprietor on the Old Man’s death. I would visualise myself getting off the bus outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin ...”

“... India, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere’. As a young woman she worked to relieve the potato famine of 1898, and later spent most of her fairly ample fortune in attempts to alleviate the routine cruelties of British rule. Francis Stuart, who at 17 married Maud’s daughter Iseult and was himself a fair hater ...”

“... in his 1901 authorised biography, a school of 20th-century muckrakers has made much of the young man’s alleged roistering in the hell-holes of night-time Leith. While writing his book, Bell reports that he was ‘asked more than once if it was true that Stevenson was a pederast’. Another set of legends gives credence to a super-virile RLS, who left ...”

“... a Japanese. Akira Suzuki (‘Brrm! Brrm!’ to his yobbish British acquaintances) is a promising young Japanese executive on a career fast track. He is slim, beautiful, a poet and a superb athlete. The antipodes, one might say, of a certain Australian. The young man has come west as to a finishing school. In London, by a ...”

“... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...”

“... period of his major critical successes, Birthright and Body and Soul – the latter provided the young Paul Robeson with his first movie role, following his star appearance in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. Nevertheless, the self-taught Micheaux seems to have lacked a certain artistic credibility. When Body and Soul opened in New York, the city’s ...”

“... to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. A fondness for playing roles ran in the family. His father, John Ross, tall, good-looking and a bit of a dandy, spent twenty years failing to complete a Life of ...”

“... it was Charles II’s recurrent malaria that finally made its use acceptable. He was treated by Robert Talbor, a Cambridge apothecary, who, while disparaging the bark, employed a secret recipe that contained it. Charles recommended Talbor to his friend Louis XIV when the Dauphin was ill with fever. The treatment was successful, and Talbor became a pensioned ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a ...”

“... Virginia, and by deliberately cultivating the impression that he was a doomed man. As one of the young women he wooed unsuccessfully in his early twenties recalled, ‘he said often that there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom.’ Or, as Poe himself wrote in one of his earliest tales, ‘it is evident that we are hurrying onward to some ...”