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“... last summer as I sat in the tearoom of Cambridge University Library and eavesdropped. Three very young, very bright, very civilised British historians were discussing a recent work on Dutch history, written by a one-time Cambridge don long since departed to the States. It had been acclaimed by reviewers as a bravura performance. It had been translated into ...”

“... James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam. ‘Oh yes,’ he said ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and most ...”

“... staying at the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, Devon in the third week of September 1931, or that Dudley Carew’s memoir, The House Is Gone, was published in 1949 by the firm of Robert Hale? Who is Dudley Carew anyway, and where does Taylor lay his hands on these remarkably recondite texts? Why should one begin a paragraph ...”

“... The young Wordsworth, standing on Westminster Bridge, felt the wonder of the city. He did not try to comprehend it as a scientific phenomenon, for it was not his job to provide a systematic explanation of the integrated operation of its ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples. And yet there is a sense of marvel that such an organism, with its mighty heart, could come into being and function in its baffling complexity, heaving with activity as so many people went about their separate occasions by day, and lying in a deep calm by night ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the man he was when I was ten I could take him along to ...”

“... 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and ...”

“... well enough, though always ready to believe himself capable of murder. He lost his parents as a young child, was unhappy with their replacements and suffered a little from the administrations of an apparently rather evil tutor; but as a child he was on the whole docile and clever – in the view of his more boisterous elder brother, ‘an unendurable little ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church ...”

“... Young Harry Potter’s parents are dead. So far, so good: many of the heroes and heroines of the classics of children’s literature are orphans, while others have invisible, unmentionable or irrelevant parents. The sorrow of grieving, not to mention the terror of helplessness, is quickly glossed over in favour of the joy of a fantasised freedom ...”

“... One Harrovian was described in 1899 as ‘doing nothing with the utmost steadiness’. The young Betjeman, who was sent down from Magdalen, wrote that ‘life was luncheons, luncheons all the way’. P.G. Wodehouse naturally decided that Bertie Wooster had been to Magdalen. In the late 19th century Magdalen began to have a few international scholars of ...”

“... Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock became Dean of St Paul’s near the close of the 17th century; there was a Portsmouth cricketer named Sherlock; of a certain Patrick Sherlock, another contemporary of Conan Doyle’s at Stonyhurst, it was declared by authority that he could ...”

“... On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children, two girls and a boy. There are four lively, happy people in the photograph, but only six arms and six legs, for the two girls share a body ...”