“Whom the gods love dies young,” wrote Menander in the late fourth century BC. “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising,” Cyril Connolly noted over two millennia later.

Discussing the “secret and more adult” appeal of Shirley Temple, Graham Greene wrote in his review of Wee Willie Winkie in 1937, “Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialog drops between their intelligence and their desire.” He also noted her “neat and well-developed rump” and “dimpled depravity.” Twentieth Century Fox sued for libel, Greene fled to Mexico, and a court ordered a settlement of 3,500 pounds.

In 1385 Robert Braybroke, bishop of London, recommended excommunication for boys who “play ball inside and outside the church [St. Paul’s Cathedral] and engage in other destructive games there, breaking and greatly damaging the glass windows and the stone images of the church.”

After watching a performance of his play Peter Pan with his five-year-old godson, J. M. Barrie asked the boy what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” the boy replied, “was tearing up the program and dropping the bits on people’s heads.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended Bowdoin College—both class of 1825—at the same time as Franklin Pierce, who was a year ahead of them. The fourteenth president of the United States was at Hawthorne’s side when the author died in 1864. Longfellow served as a pallbearer at the funeral.