“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”

“... effort, a novel about a historian of the Nazis who is also a Nazi sympathiser – in 1995, Robert Kelly, in a somewhat grudging review in the New York Times, spoke honestly about the prompt reviewer’s quandary: ‘It is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds ...”

“... or indeed luckier, than Wren. While his uncle was in the Tower for recalcitrant royalism, the young scholar nevertheless got support from several of Cromwell’s kinsmen. The Lord Protector burst into one dinner to offer a deal for the prisoner’s release, and was in any case soon persuaded to help Wren himself to a prestigious professorship in ...”

“... he wrote in 1994. ‘The words evoke a weedy figure: the playful writer, probably male, never young (although often juvenile), sauntering nonchalantly down sunny boulevards … Faber ludens – a little ludicrous, too; hardly dangerous; hardly serious.’ Mathews felt most comfortable when he was out of place. Perhaps his experience at boarding school (as ...”

“... Story of the Rippling Train’ (published in Longman’s Magazine) concerns the ghost of a young woman, Maud, whose elaborate dress catches fire, leaving her horribly disfigured and condemned to an agonising death. Such accidents were common in an age of flowing skirts, candles and open fires, and women might well have been haunted by the thought of ...”

“... behaviours’ he had diagnosed in his rats – homosexual mating, rejection or eating of the young, loss of sex drive, indiscriminate aggression. By the end of the experiment, fertility rates had crashed. More worrying was the fact that the ‘aberrant behaviours’ seemed to persist when mice were removed from Universe 25. Many of their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the World Economic Conference in London, and went with de Jouvenel, Drieu la Rochelle and other young idealists to Berlin for a gruesome attempt at a Franco-German rapprochement. That’s about half of what she did. The writing, quoted here, seems already as concrete, intense and precise as it would ever be. Although she had the self-made woman’s disdain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... grimly dramatises its author’s terror. Closer to home, and to the immobility against which the young Edith chafed, is the ‘static force’ of Lily Bart’s aunt in The House of Mirth (1905): ‘To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.’ Long after Wharton herself ...”

“... cabinet secret. There is no tomorrow. But Mme de T–– had not expected to tangle with the young chevalier and now her real lover (stalking the shadows of the story) has been cuckolded. Something has changed, and not even Mme de T–– can claim to control the workings of circumstance. It is a libertine truth that you cannot rehearse a ...”

“... in December 1972. Few remember her life. Even the memories of her children, most of whom were very young at the time, clash and contradict. McConville was dragged out of the family’s flat by an IRA gang. A few weeks later, a young man brought back her purse. In it was 52p and the three rings she had been wearing. In a BBC ...”

“... Past and Future. And Yale has inaugurated a new series, ‘Why X Matters’, with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters. Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The ...”