“... hour – and he hasn’t had a braver one since – it wasn’t all that brave: he was only a young member of the Illinois state legislature. Had he been on the Senate floor with Clinton, Kerry and Edwards he might not have been so bold. The other thing Obama is known for is his memoir, Dreams from My Father, which was first published in 1995, four years ...”

“... and he was 55. I was twenty when I started sitting for him. I was a very romantic, self-conscious young woman. My voluptuousness (as Lucian described my curves) gave me a maternal air. I offered the notion of comfort to Lucian, which he felt badly in need of. But the intimacy that evolved between us was a challenge for him. He was threatened by it. He told me ...”

“... talking about Georgia,’ Zurab shouted. God, not more Kakheti red wine? A thin young woman with an escort of men in black leather jackets came over to give him a kiss. ‘Know who that was? Edward Shevardnadze’s granddaughter. She’s in TV news. And you know who directed that fantastic shot – the look on Shevy’s face as Misha ...”

“... across the panorama of blight, wheel-hubs for discuses. Trail of the Spider by Anja Kirschner and David Panos announced itself as a Situationist spaghetti western shot on Hackney Marshes; where, the makers assert, the land-grab expansionism of the Old West ‘collides with suppressed history’. Range wars erupt along ‘a vanishing frontier, swarming with ...”

“... but nor has he come across one where it isn’t controlled. Suppose Colin Spencer was a young member of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, and made in the flesh the blunder that he makes in language when he describes them, of confusing active and passive in an oral act of sex. Suppose, to be brutally frank, that he blew when the cultural ...”

“... of Late Victorian social reform. At this stage, one of Toryism’s least secret weapons was the Young Conservative organisation. Anthony Bailey, then a schoolboy in Hampshire, recalls: ‘I did a number of things purely because they provided a way of meeting girls. I joined the local branch of the Young Conservatives for ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...”

“... full of villains – Catherine de Medici and the Earl of Moray – and gentle playmates for the young queen. They are full of serious historical research and wild, passionate moments of self-abandon. There are marvellous scenes in the first book, most of the fun provided by the virile Bothwell:Bothwell came to the queen’s apartment and he stood on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners ...”

“... A crumpled young man​ , fresh off a Greyhound bus, is sitting in the back of a taxi and talking – to himself as much as to the driver. ‘Man, I just had the weirdest dream back on the bus there … D’you ever have those dreams that are just completely real?’ In the opening scene of Slacker (1990), Richard Linklater, who also directs the film, plays a version of himself, peppering his monologue on the nature of reality with references to Tolstoy, Frank Zappa and The Wizard of Oz ...”

“... seems to have been a moment when James wasn’t Jamesian – at once vividly recognisable as a young child and identical, often comically so, with the ageing novelist now telling his story. The most unlikely incidents serve to anticipate his future self, as when he identifies the memory of ‘a very big Newfoundland dog on whose back I was put to ...”

“... establish a seat of learning. ‘Father, I want you to build a university for the benefit of poor young men,’ he declares in the most affecting version, ‘so they can have the same advantages the rich have.’ For several months he remained physically with his distraught parents, pausing at select mortuaries as they made their way slowly back to the ...”

“... last years of his life. It was then given to the Benslow Music Trust which provides violins for young players.23 February. I love jokes and used to be fed them almost on a weekly basis by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would ...”

“... of the local terror. The powerful role of the Politburo in the Great Purge is again made clear in David Hoffman’s chapter on Moscow. According to Hoffman, ‘the tone of party committee meetings at factories changed overnight’ after a secret letter had been received passing on the Politburo’s directive to root out all Trotskyists. In last autumn’s ...”