“... funeral procession to Brookwood Crematorium required three special trains and was attended by many young men who were to be heard much of in the next century, notably Gandhi and Lloyd George. Lord Queensberry was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh ...”

“... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...”

“... from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three years earlier, during a visit to Cambridge, he had posed the puzzle which started Newton on the path to his Principia. What is the orbit of a planet under the influence of an attractive force ...”

“... walk without the aid of shoes with built-in platforms. This procedure was carried out on young women who contracted polio so that they would be able to wear high-heels when they grew up. She wore callipers – iron bars rigged up to the knee, one end of which slotted into deep holes in specially made black boots – until she was 16. During this time ...”

“... families with investments, while at the same time inflating housing costs to levels that most young people struggle with.The book shows that many of the families which maintain their status in the wealth elite over decades can rely not just on one generation of financial support but on two. Rich grandparents are as useful as rich parents. This is hardly ...”

“... the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for the 21st century.‘How to Write about Africa’ set the tone for a weary scepticism about the way non-Africans behave or speak when they arrive on the continent. For the British-Nigerian essayist Dipo ...”

“... and patrician carriage promoted his career. Todd is not a man who could ever have been overlooked. Young Alex walked to and from school in wretched wartime shoes (those were great days for the profiteers who were said to make cardboard shoes for issue to the trenches). Todd thinks it was these shoes in conjunction with the inadequate wartime diet that were ...”

“... them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young Huxley, desirous of one of the few footholds in a poorly-paid scientific profession, to the time when Owen redesigned his dinosaurs to make sure they could not possibly fit Huxley’s phylogeny. Much of the fascination of Desmond’s story stems from the ...”

“... to Adorno), while Teddie, whom the sociologist Leo Löwenthal described as ‘the pampered young gentleman from a well-to-do family’, was rarely troubled by self-doubt.‘My condition is ghastly,’ Kracauer wrote in his first letter to Adorno:I am so fearful about the transience of what is dearest to me – what to me is the meaning or the ...”

“... but the poem ends:Maybe what they say is trueOf war and war’s alarms;But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.Thomas Mann comes into all this because, in a lightly sardonic spirit, Yeats took as the epigraph to his poem a phrase from Mann which MacLeish had cited on the same page as his account of Yeats’s failure to keep up to ...”

“... elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like ...”

“... A prim and eager young clerk, working for his art-dealer uncle, is writing to his schoolboy brother. Pictures and books are the 19-year-old’s meat and drink: he soon adds Millais, Dickens and George Eliot to his love for Jean-François Millet, when in 1873, Goupil & Co, agents in lithographs, steel engravings and ‘modern paintings’, send him from The Hague to their branch just off the Strand ...”

“... swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to fight. One young woman in the counter-demonstration was murdered by a man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. Dozens ...”

“... General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and son. (‘I won’t go into the fact that you’re the first member of this family to fail any ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”