“... a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live in a sort of waking dream.’ When his belief fails, which means when transcendentalism ...”

“... about them one might expect to be directed at a public curiosity, or even, more ordinarily, at a young girl. Crachami was not a horror attraction, like her more famous successor, the Elephant Man (whom his rescuer Frederick Treves described, when he first found him in 1884, as ‘the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen’). The general ...”

“... not incongruous, it is because, rather than preparing the way for a portrait of the historian as a young man, the passage quoted above closes the door on further exploration of the self of this kind. A deeply felt, imaginative re-creation of the youth he once was abruptly gives way to another kind of enterprise. We never glimpse the same inner landscape ...”

“... running mate. In his bid to become president, Ramaswamy also suggested that he would pardon Trump, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, and that he intended to fire 75 per cent of federal employees. Anyone who thinks that Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page document about what should happen in Trump’s second term, advocating the ...”

“... or truth but an object of ridicule and an image of cowardice. The ‘hope’, meanwhile, is that Edward of Lancaster, the 17-year-old Prince of Wales, will live long and ‘renew’ the ‘glories’ of his grandfather Henry V. Instead, barely forty lines later, the boy is captured by the Yorkist faction, mocked and wondered at – ‘Can so ...”

“... them with concern – was recognisably the same person of whom Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she subjects everyone to the most emotionally exhausting arguments; the other is that she still interrupts everyone all the time. It makes us all ...”

“... talking about Georgia,’ Zurab shouted. God, not more Kakheti red wine? A thin young woman with an escort of men in black leather jackets came over to give him a kiss. ‘Know who that was? Edward Shevardnadze’s granddaughter. She’s in TV news. And you know who directed that fantastic shot – the ...”

“... that he has consumed, a fictional character who makes himself out of fictional characters. As a young man Freud was an avid reader, and was very good at and interested in languages. He learned Spanish, as he wrote to a correspondent in 1923, for a particular reason: ‘When I was a young student the desire to read the ...”

“... educational institutions of Manila, and soon afterwards in Europe. By the 1870s, a small, young mestizo intelligentsia – the so-called ilustrados – was coming into existence. And it was through this younger generation, attending the same schools, reading (and writing for) the same young Spanish-language ...”

“... site of the Battle of Gettysburg is the first such enterprise in modern history. The precedent, as Edward Everitt, the Harvard president and professor of classics who was the main speaker at its dedication, pointed out, was the ‘immortal field’ at Marathon, which we read about in Herodotus. Between the ancient Greeks and modern times we seem to have been ...”

“... pushed a younger child into a vessel of hot water with fatal results. During the reign of Edward I, a pardon was extended to a child under seven, even though, by then, it was laid down that a child under seven could not be convicted of felony. Much later, in 1748, William York, aged ten, murdered a child of five and buried her in a dunghill. ‘When ...”

“... in World War Two, the ‘turning’ of German agents. That was when MI5 took in all those bright young dons, like my recruiter in the 1960s, to help the ex-colonial introverts out. Thereafter, MI5’s achievement was patchy: catching some spies, but missing a lot, including the Cambridge Five, and smearing several innocents. It was also hugely damaged in the ...”

“... of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the shoddy detritus of ...”

“... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...”

“... a philandering husband and a jealous wife. She had a few affairs, one in Deia on Mallorca with a young Scotsman who turned up at her door with a gold and green enamel lighter, claiming she’d left it in the American Bar. Another with a polo player. After riding, Larsen wrote gleefully, she was too sore to sit at the typewriter. When she finally sent off her ...”