“... On 30 January 1734 eight young men met for supper at the Golden Eagle Tavern in Suffolk Street near Charing Cross. They were a high-spirited, hard-drinking and well-connected group. One was an earl, two of the others were viscounts and all but one were members of the recently formed Society of Dilettanti. As the evening wore on one thing led to another ...”

“... and deference to French and American art that mark much British work of the period. Only Francis Bacon shows the body disrupted and distorted as she does.Cordell’s work, and what one critic called her ‘legendary panache’, should have ensured her a place at the forefront of British art. She was praised by critics and had successful exhibitions ...”

“... two other sets of sexual prohibitions: those on sex or marriage with people who are considered too young (a boundary often managed by phenomena such as initiations into adulthood), and those on obtaining sex by force (most if not all societies place sanctions on rape, though definitions vary widely). Parent-child incest is now commonly understood in Western ...”

“... as Darwin vents his exasperation as he attempts to get to grips with it. Soon, he and his son Francis make elaborate arrangements to offload the ‘printing machine’ on the ecstatically grateful zoologist Carl Gottfried Semper, who then uses it to write back to Darwin entirely in capital letters. But the large questions are never far away. Evolution ...”

“... early thirties. He was the literary editor of the New Statesman and I was a junior editor – ‘a young editor here’, my boss used to say – at Faber and Faber. I didn’t know him well – a friend of mine, Francis Hope, was his assistant – but I talked to him at parties and once or twice I had lunch with him (I ...”

“... in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told. John Wayne’s film The Green Berets ...”

“... vision was the Habsburgs’ loathed neighbour and rival for European supremacy, France. The young Charles was quickly dragged into the three-cornered diplomatic dance that had shaped the politics of northwestern Europe for generations. Aged eight, he was betrothed to Mary, daughter of Henry VII of England, France’s other old enemy. (Like so much in ...”

“... the Paddington frisk’. ‘The whole vagabond population of London,’ the diarist Francis Place wrote, ‘all the thieves, and all the prostitutes, all those who were evil-minded, and some, a comparatively few, curious people made up the mob on those brutalising occasions.’ The memorial to the execution site at Marble Arch is embedded in the ...”

“... to John Ogilby’s county survey; answering Anthony Wood’s hail of questions (‘What is Francis Potter’s epitaph? When and where did Dr John Godolphin die?’) as Wood prepared his history of Oxford University. There could be a guileless enthusiasm to Aubrey that meant he was often betrayed: when Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses was published in ...”

“... guide his flock and give direction to his life. The problems of the flock are various: Shirley, a young woman whose gay husband has run off with another man, is lonely, and her son is more deeply damaged still by his father’s desertion. Norah, a retired nurse, is unhappily married to a barrister who grieves petulantly for the domestic efficiency and ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... and accusations of corruption. A particular bombshell was the Guo Meimei saga of 2011. A pretty young woman who claimed to be a Red Cross manager – her Weibo profile had a blue verification badge confirming it – was seen all over the internet flaunting her Maserati, Hermès bags and generally extravagant lifestyle. There was an uproar on social ...”

“... I am seeing.’ Caravaggio was a criminal, and criminals seemed to like him. His Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence was cut out of its frame in Palermo by mafiosi; a shady Swiss dealer was ready to slice the canvas into pieces, the better to sell on the black market, until he unrolled it and (reputedly) burst into tears. It’s impossible to be cool ...”

“... the present selection is full of the kind of youth-mongering that appears to slide naturally into young-fogeyism. You won’t find David and Nikos smoking the hard stuff with Mick and Keith. Plante is living out the fantasy of being a Jamesian personality in Europe and would be more likely to swoon at the sight of Frances Partridge than, say, Jimi Hendrix. We ...”

“... asked Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical settings), but Cruise didn’t know what she meant and sent some cash instead. Farrell, however, was in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond ...”