“... isn’t typical of The Arabian Nights, and the success story of Ali Baba and the romance of the young man and the fairy queen echo the extravagant and often sly fairytales – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The White Cat’ – that were being retrieved and written down in France by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy in the 1690s. D’Aulnoy did, however, claim ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... programme initiated by the Vichy regime in September 1941, which sent large numbers of young Frenchmen to Germany against their will, provoked many others into joining the Resistance. The rapidly intensifying persecution of French Jews in both the occupied and unoccupied zones was not a central focus of the Resistance, which remained silent to the ...”

“... have her V-plates intact … the age-old requisite for future queen consorts.’ The equation of young women and toilets is gross and the far side of misogyny but it’s only to be expected in a tampophiliac family with a fondness for ‘robust’ wardroom language, a capacious repository of bodily fluid gags and lavatory jokes, and a subscription to a ...”

“... last years of his life. It was then given to the Benslow Music Trust which provides violins for young players.23 February. I love jokes and used to be fed them almost on a weekly basis by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”

“... opponents. It was bitter men from the Premier’s own party who were in at the kill, the impatient young, together with those no longer young whose ambitions had been too long frustrated. But even the loss of power had its compensations. There was a peerage and a fortune. The Premier’s children, too, had been enriched by ...”

“... Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In short order he received his manuscript back with the news, written on it by hand, that ‘we are not now and never will be interested in Spinoza ...”

“... of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter alios) the undergraduate Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of ...”

“... and lovable, too. So in 1765 Samuel Johnson appended to Rowe’s life the story that when young Will was doing time as the early modern equivalent of a car-park attendant, looking after playgoers’ horses outside a London theatre, ‘he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, that in a short time every man as he alighted called for Will ...”

“... First Lord of the Admiralty before the Battle of Jutland he did consent to be called at nine. As a young MP, it was only when his third session in the House loomed that he showed up, spurred on by his Aunt Georgie Salisbury’s chiding that it was time to show some ‘overt signs of parliamentary activity’. He claimed never to read the newspapers, made no ...”

“... from the police in all these videos: disbelief, rage, grief, the recognition that yet another young black man has been killed. The video transforms an excruciating personal disaster, a private moment, into a public and political event. If we are not police or prosecutors, not a member of a community-relations group or a public commission on violence; if ...”

“... years he has watched it all: enclosure, civil war, the church being built, civic organisation, young people getting killed far away, parish do-gooding, village expansion, razed hedges, rising house prices. To him Article 50 would be just a blip. He is ancient and forever young. All this is so unlike what you’d expect ...”

“... idea of becoming an MP, he went disastrously into banking – the fashionable escape route for ‘young gentlemen’ who wished to avoid becoming ‘tradesmen’. As soon as decently possible after his father’s death, he set himself up at Cote House, a country estate outside Bristol, and there, having no active duties in the pottery or at the bank, he ...”

“... was rung up some years ago by a researcher working on Hugh Dalton’s diaries to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow ...”