“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion ...”

“... like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific (‘the wrath of God’), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated. The race to identify the ultimate ...”

“... in the public mind, and certainly not the high political fashion it has now become among some young Muslim women. It was the conscientious Lionel Jospin who had to deal with the first big veil controversy, at the very end of the decade – he was minister of education at the time – involving a head teacher in Créteil who refused to let girls come to ...”

“... Khadra, Kabul has long represented an abyss narrowly avoided. In the 1980s, roughly six hundred young Algerian men, many of them protégés of Muslim Brothers from Egypt and Wahhabi imams from Saudi Arabia, went to Afghanistan to join the anti-Soviet jihad. After the Russians withdrew, the Algerian ‘Afghans’ returned home to fight their own ...”

“... could come and go, travel or pursue an education, seek work or live outside the camp, and (for the young and female) trade companionship or sex for meals, dates or even marriage: for a DP woman, Fitzpatrick writes, marriage to an American GI was ‘as good as it got’. Indeed, DPs who were young at the time often remember ...”

“... rising a little, his look reflective. These two fatigued pioneers are comfortably welcoming a young master and colleague. The Flaherty portrait recalls Ingres’s M. Bertin (the drawing, not the painting), the bluff man with his hands on his knees in defiance of all portrait convention. The glorious black-and-whiteness of all these portraits and scenes ...”

“... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist laws to freeze the ...”

“... with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.The ...”

“... like the only life left on the earth, all other plants having sent their sap below. Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape (1811), a version of which is currently on display at the Towner Gallery (until 22 January), shows a snowy post-sunset scene with a group of pine trees in the foreground, and the dark form of a distant cathedral just visible ...”

“... his sister on the day of a family party. The prosecutor in the case was Christie, and he and the young Kushner are said to have been at odds throughout the campaign. So far the Trump regime seems to consist of four factions, bound together by personal loyalty to the president-elect, some of it long-standing, most of it recent and opportunistic. There is ...”

“... of a beauty and complexity to be found nowhere else in Western Europe except Spain. They married young and sought to drive out the English by outnumbering them. All the same, even if a way of life based exclusively upon the potato may be richer than Sir Charles Trevelyan suggests, when the root fails, all is lost. It is estimated that up to a million people ...”

“... He argues, for instance, that Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are autobiographical novels of a broadly similar kind, dependent for intelligibility on a knowledge of their biographical contexts and sources, and less good than Dickens’s earlier version of the same thing: ‘Neither book is as variegated and ...”

“... really be polarised against marriage for ‘convenience’? Do systems which purport to allow young people to choose their own marital partners really act in this way or are they a fiction? How do systems of ‘free’ mate-selection really work? Is there a radical difference in attitude and practice with regard to such matters in families and social ...”

“... combining riffs on Mao and Mies van der Rohe with explicit sex scenes between a trio of attractive young Londoners, in a weird baby-talk register – all ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ and short, repetitive sentences. ‘And Nana and Moshe were romantic. They were romantic in their way. They loved each other. They said they loved each other. It was true.’ The ...”