“... British military band. It was all very amicable, but the humiliation festered in the heart of the young Charles de Gaulle, who would go on, nearly seventy years later, to block the UK’s entrance to the Common Market.Pozzi, who translated Darwin and ‘had his suits and curtains made from material sent from London’, is presented as an exemplar of the good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not only did it do splendidly at the box office, but it also won the endorsement of both the young Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with Sartre (whose life is strikingly similar to that of Brecht) learning the catchy tunes by heart.’ As an approach, this is about as discriminating as the ducking-stool, and will no doubt draw similar circles of ...”

“... are ever as reluctant as this. This has a lot to do with Coppola’s astonishing troupe of actors: Robert Duvall, James Caan, Thalia Shire, Diane Keaton, Al Pacino. They make you feel not that this is the world of the Mafia, but that a dark world of family values, of murder and jollity and food and sentiment, can only be like this; and they make almost every ...”

“... Reign of Love’ – was replaced by that of ‘Bloody Bill’ Marsden, an outstanding sadist. The young Hogg, as Lewis puts it, ‘co-operated enthusiastically in Marsden’s disciplinary reforms’. What can that mean? That he flogged smaller boys with a passion rare even in that intensely homoerotic environment? And his only redeeming feature, his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. The war in Vietnam, by contrast, is widely viewed as a needless contest fought by an army that fell apart while experiencing the aftershocks of social divisions at home. Its ...”