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“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open ...”

“... In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of discipline. ‘Guess which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History ...”

“... of the defiant speeches made in defence of the Spanish Republic and the Popular Front. And, as a young politician in prewar Chile, Allende had arranged to give refuge to many anti-Franco Spaniards and Catalans and Basques. Moreover, he had sent a delegation to the Bolivian frontier in late 1968, to rescue the cadaverous survivors of Che Guevara’s doomed ...”

“... family – though, curiously enough, the doings of the Princess of Wales are of great moment to young Saudi women. Even the censors, with their big black felt-tips, have been known to spare the royal decolletage; the Princess shares with the Empress Maria Theresa, whose image graced the old silver coinage, the distinction of being the only bared bosom on ...”

“... A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers ...”

“... the walls. Instead she constructs a version of the party in her imagination, in which a lonely young woman guest will be her friend. The old woman begins picking at a tiny dent in the plaster on the wall between the houses, tearing and pulling until she removes enough plaster to see light from the neighbours’ kitchen. She squeezes into the space between ...”

“... of German painters, some of whom, it was rumoured, he had surreptitiously employed. That the young artist should have had assistants of this kind seems unlikely (and probably reflects stories put about by envious rivals), but it is likely that he was influenced by views of Alpine scenery and studies of animals made by Dürer and other German artists who ...”

“... fiction. The originator of the genre is a work better than either Faber’s or Waters’s novel: Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight. Published in 1940, this went through five impressions in as many months (despite Ministry of Supply paper restrictions) and was filmed as a lush Gainsborough melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James Mason (the ...”

“... they’ve decided there is nothing left to lose. This certainly appears to be the case with Andrew Young, whose stomach-churning, jaw-dropping account of his time spent working for, befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new ...”

“... danger and discomfort are paramount. Borneo, written by the imprint’s publisher, Robert Pelton Young, describes itself as one of ‘a series of guides on remote regions for adventurers by adventurers’ and begins with a taste of what may lie in store for the user: I am squatting in a small clearing at night in the Borneo jungle … Sounds of tree ...”

“... suffering from chest pains hours before the massive heart attack that killed him, raged to a young admirer. ‘But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press.’ He kept her letters in a tin box, he confided, and would retaliate by auctioning them off. Enjoying something of a revival in the New Left Sixties and early Seventies ...”

“... of the duke of Saxony, but reserves a special half-contemptuous pity for ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’. He is, admittedly, good-looking, but has no proper national dress, wearing instead a German bonnet, an Italian doublet and French hose. Despite this outfit he is fatally parochial, the monoglot speaker of an obscure offshore language no ...”

“... in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional bonds built up through years of familiarity and ‘surrogate ...”

“... Hazlitt has a modern feel about him. Among the poets of his age, dying young or turning, like Wordsworth, into pillars of the establishment, he represents a kind of muddling through, an honesty baffled and contingent, inconsistent even; not living in the world of romantic ideals and simplifying gestures but ground in the daily mill of intrigue and accommodation ...”

“... 1974, when IRA bombs were going off all over the place. In the dock was this tiny, strange, silent young woman. The case against her consisted of a string of unequivocal confessions to the bombings at Manchester, Latimer and Euston. None of the confessions was denied – how could they be? Some of the most damning of them had been written in the defendant’s ...”