“... back to ancient Egypt and the correlation of beauty with power would probably not have caused any young woman to lift an eyebrow, let alone to dream of collagen implants. Monumental images were limited (no movie screens or giant billboards) and controlled (no nubile lovelies cavorting on the TV in the living-room), so that beauty could become one of the ...”

“... at court. Pampered, dominated, and early inculcated in the family trait of nonchalant arrogance, young William became a fashionable and good-looking presence in high society without acquiring the vigour and determination necessary to kindle his innate intelligence. Shortly after becoming heir to the Melbourne title in 1805, he took the unstable Caroline ...”

“... great Labour landslide year, that the first Nuffield election study appeared, with the hand of a young David Butler already apparent. It was, sadly, a jejune and disappointing volume which explains very little of the last great realigning election of modern times. Since then Butler has taken an increasingly dominant role in the enterprise and the books have ...”

“... of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition at that time, mostly crumbling tenements, more than half of them without an inside bath and with a loo on the stairs.Just west of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the ...”

“... people who identified themselves as ‘English’, 32.4 million chose that as their sole identity. Michael Ashcroft’s referendum-day poll found that 79 per cent of people who described themselves as ‘English not British’ voted Leave. But there is less evidence for the claim that the English voted for, or currently want, constitutional change. Despite the ...”

“... to find conventional, unresponsive and boring. Before long, he fell in love with Amy Catherine, a young science student who was capable of sharing in his literary and scientific interests if not of matching his sexual appetite. They married in 1895 and had two sons. This marriage lasted until her death in 1927 and it seems wise not to rush to judgment about ...”

“... of the prospects and the profit of doing it. One of Baldwin’s earliest biographers, G.M. Young, is told off (nearly all previous writers on Baldwin are told off for talking nonsense of one kind or another) for initiating a strand of interpretation ‘where psychological or temperamental supposition replaces adequate historical ...”

“... Amritsar . . . Amritsar is in Punjab’) in order to bum a cigarette. There is the smart-alecky young subway dweller named Heather Covington, a casualty of mental illness and medication herself, who deflates Will’s earnest provocations with pointed jokes. When Will tries to explain that global warming is shaped like an upward curve, rather than a straight ...”

“... as an entrance into imagining and longing and learning. In her teens she belonged in a set of keen young readers and writers, girls and boys – they shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept ...”

“... real books to his name and selections of work in the two most influential anthologies of the time, Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse and Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Eliot was a sincere admirer and generous patron; Yeats was delighted with Barker’s ‘lovely subtle mind and a rhythmic invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins’. What ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”

“... things apply to Johnson, but a Venn diagram of these various characteristics would also include Michael Gove, Douglas Carswell, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The result of these disparate characteristics is a comfortable familiarity with the myths and rituals of the British state, but a blasé indifference to the impact of policy. As Ian Jack pointed ...”

“... to be enlarged by the 1867 Reform Act. He was elected MP for Westminster in 1865, and a group of young dons, known to posterity as ‘the lights of liberalism’, attempted to follow him into Parliament in order to contribute a new high-minded leadership. They were Liberals not because they regarded the Conservatives as particularly materialist but because ...”

“... Roosevelt (‘the greatest publicity man of that time’, according to Sinclair), who sent the young author a three-page analysis of The Jungle and an invitation to visit him at the White House for further discussion. These events led directly to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (although not, to Sinclair’s ...”

“... many things’, has been summoned by King Minos to find his missing son, Glaucus (in most accounts young Glaucus has fallen into a jar of honey). The play turns on a second request: that Polyidus bring him back to life. When he refuses, Minos entombs him alive with Glaucus. While interred, he learns from two snakes how to use herbs to revive the boy. They are ...”