“... 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 ...”

“... reduced to a Parliamentary group of only four MPs (including two of his children), that the young Selwyn Lloyd drifted towards the Conservatives. Indeed he might even have been tempted to join the ‘family party’ itself since his name had often been linked with that of Megan Lloyd George. At Cambridge in the Twenties, it was Lloyd’s Liberal ...”

“... which are [his emphasis] at the forefront of culture, those which excite the imagination of the young ... ’; and they are identified as art and utopian politics. This identification itself seems at this present moment rather strange, but even apart from that, it is clear that whether or not the sciences do or do not excite the ...”

“... shocking impact. We do indeed start with an intent adolescent watcher of a Mafia hangout, a young Irish-Italian named Henry Hill, and his fascination does lead him to a compromising involvement in illegality and a witnessing of horrific violence. He undergoes something of an ordeal and he too ends by extricating himself from the guilt of his actions and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a resonant if pretty yukky farewell to life. Sadly, when I got home, I found it was a quote from Robert Frost. Even so, Tony didn’t just pass away and wanted to be remembered for not doing so. Perhaps he died of disappointment at not even being able to think up an epitaph of his own. Mostly, disappointment of one kind or another is what my generation died ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser in Robert Ley’s Strength through Joy organisation, which provided ‘classless’ holidays for (some) members of the Volksgemeinschaft, subsidised by money seized from the trade unions. In the remaining years of peace it cruised the Mediterranean and the Norwegian ...”

“... robbers and even on their stout bearing on the gallows. In late Elizabethan years the Jesuit Robert Parsons conjectured that there was more highway robbery in England than probably anywhere in the world. The miscreants ‘were sometimes of no base Condition, or Quality . . . but rather Gentlemen, or wealthy Men’s Sons, moved thereunto not so much 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”