In her account of tenth-century Kyoto court life, The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon was fond of making lists. “Things later regretted: an adopted child who turns out to have an ugly face”; “Things it’s frustrating and embarrassing to witness: someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child, carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says”; “Moving things: a child dressed in mourning for a parent.”

Among the anecdotes, descriptions, and stray ideas in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Note-Books, a collection modeled on Samuel Butler’s famous version of the same name, are the entries: “story of the ugly aunt in the album,” “sent a girl flowers on Mother’s Day,” “reversion to childhood typical of the only child.”

Yemen’s parliament passed a law setting the minimum age for marriage at seventeen in 2009, having been spurred by the national attention given to the story of ten-year-old Nujood Ali, who was granted a divorce from a thirty-year-old man. The child-marriage legislation passed in parliament but was put on hold by conservative members, citing potential inconsistencies with Sharia law.

“I must admit, ‘the Mitfords’ would madden me if I didn’t chance to be one,” Diana Mitford—the sister who had wed the leader of the British Union of Fascists in 1936 at the house of Joseph Goebbels—wrote at the age of seventy-four in 1985 to her youngest sister, Deborah, who had married Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941.