“... murder. Evans had not been in Rhyl on 22 August but he had heard later from several people that a young Londoner had been looking for him that night. Could he find any of these people, we asked? Yes, he would try. The following week Jo Mennel and John Morgan, the reporter, went back to interview the Rhyl witnesses on camera. Over a cup of tea in a ...”

“... phoned CFIDS leaders in every city along Showalter’s book tour for this week,’ wrote Roger Burns, the site co-ordinator, ‘so hopefully she will be challenged wherever she speaks.’ He suggested that patients try to unsettle me with questions about my own mental health, such as ‘Are you psychiatric?’ and ‘How well is Elaine?’ Doctors ...”

“... the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s like a modern memorandum or a press release. Young Glen, though he can’t be so young today, had a good ghost writer in Pete Silverton. I guess that Pete pretty accurately represents Glen’s voice, as well as his ambitions. In the words of the blurb, ‘Matlock ...”

“... Already in 1519 Erasmus, in a letter clearly intended to be made public, refers to him as ‘that young man’ who ‘is a great favourite of mine. It would take a very grievous wrong to break off my friendship with him.’ Times were exciting. Scholarship was flourishing. Erasmus could wish he was young again. But nobody ...”

“... Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession ...”

“... closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the non-oak ‘underwood’ of coppicing for ...”

“... monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the London Jews.At first ...”

“... according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd … He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to ...”

“... for international sanity’? Some subjects, like the Duke of Windsor, are let off lightly. Sir Roger Casement, executed for treason, was judged ‘honest and honourable’ by those who knew him, but the victim of ‘misguided extremism in time of war’. ‘Misguided’ is a useful word on these occasions. Nancy Mitford was ‘buried ... beside her ...”

“... some Victorian male-romances of the Haggard kind. They make Death of a Princess look like The Young Visiters.) But Haggard, who produced almost sixty romances and novels, wanted to be something more than a writer of page-turners. He wanted to serve his country in a high-minded volunteer way. ‘I believe that public service is my true line,’ he ...”

“... disastrous for both Henry’s reign and her own liberty. In 1173, Eleanor’s sons, Henry ‘the Young King’, Richard (later called Lionheart) and Geoffrey of Brittany, rebelled against their father, encouraged by Louis VII. Most chroniclers agree that Eleanor supported their revolt. Why she did so isn’t clear, but Henry was publicly unfaithful and the ...”

“... are present in the title of Amit Chaudhuri’s intelligent and funny new novel, which follows a young Bengali man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by Homer, ‘noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without ...”

“... was irrelevant; all that mattered was content flow. Evan Spiegel, the impossibly rich, impossibly young-looking co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. (formerly Snapchat) was there in person. He talked about augmented reality and what his company was doing for young people’s mental health with the air of being barely present ...”

“... Even so a self-portrait takes shape from this collage. Olivier was unwanted, ‘born to a young girl and a married man, taken in by an aunt who taunted her, and groped by a lascivious old uncle who made dominoes from old bones and, as she slept, kissed her breasts, pressed his hand over her mouth and tried to get into bed with her.’ ‘Fernande ...”

“... at the age of 38. She had been friendly or acquainted with other members of the group, including Roger Fry and Ottoline Morrell, but she never belonged to the inner circle of either Bloomsbury generation. Like her fellow painter and sometime lover Mark Gertler she worked ‘on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’, as the handout at Dora Carrington: Beyond ...”