“... and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 1935. His childhood seems to have been appalling and he was reluctant to discuss it. He never knew his ...”

“... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...”

“... countryside, and the victims had no one to speak for them. On a visit to Uganda earlier this year, Kenneth Kaunda broke the long public silence about Milton Obote’s second regime, saying that on his previous visit he had wept and prayed at the spectacle of the leadership’s heavy drinking habits. No one spoke up at the time, just as they knew but kept quiet ...”

“... Like Golding’s novel, Speranza begins with the journal of a healthy, self-satisfied, idealistic young gentleman enjoying an adventurous voyage and uttering Enlightenment cries in Romantic language. ‘Oh, bliss, to be young in the light of morning over the sea! To awaken refreshed, ...”

“... when all-night parties, partner-swapping, drugs and drink characterised the lives of his wild young friends, Ashton was too ambitious to be led far astray. He began to cultivate influential people: Ashley Dukes (Rambert’s husband), the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, and, most important of all, the ...”

“... you were also very shy, as Robert Mapplethorpe was (born in 1946, he was in the 1960s still a very young artist making jewellery, collages and assemblages inspired by Joseph Cornell, and not yet taking photographs inspired by Nadar, Stieglitz and Steichen), you wouldn’t merely have been afraid of being seen, you would have dreaded it. In private, you would ...”

“... melancholy and defensive. Peter Templer in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (the young man’s name oddly echoes that of the Saint in Leslie Charteris’s unreadable thrillers) has something like the Fleming panache, drive and business sense, and his lifestyle the same unreal quality. But Templer, who is killed during the war on an operation ...”

“... the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased nature’. In the years of journalistic hackwork that followed he fell out with almost every editor and proprietor who employed him, and ...”

“... religious establishments. With a bit of initiative, the effect was easily conjured up: as a very young man Shelley incarcerated himself overnight in the vaults of the local church, in order to rouse his instinct for terror to the right pitch. He wanted to be ‘harrowed by fear’. Woodward, an unashamed romantic of the same school, has similarly set himself ...”

“... of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden (2010), a history of the British folk-rock movement which was almost contemporaneous with these broadcasts, finds that ...”

“... when there was a story to tell that the ‘pressure of style’ was least relaxed. When the young Berenson disparaged ‘illustration’, he was certainly influenced by the priorities of contemporary artists, whether or not he was as familiar as Clark proposes with the achievements of Degas and Cézanne. A huge rift soon developed between most of the ...”

“... The model for Life on Earth – thirteen hour-long episodes telling the story of evolution – was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), which Attenborough had commissioned as controller of BBC2. Other programmes he brought to the channel included The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and (making the most of the new colour technology) the ...”

“... 1986, Enron was involved in joint drilling with Bush’s company, Spectrum 7. Enron’s chairman, Kenneth Lay, seems to have developed a joshing intimacy with Bush. Loren Fox reproduces Bush’s 1997 birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful ...”

“... he sips and nibbles, sits up and begins to feel better. Observe the cunning sequence in which Kenneth Grahame presents the effect of food on emotion: first an olfactory promise and suggestiveness, then the real thing, and in basic form. Hot buttered toast is surely what one would dream of on a desert island, rather than caviar and Krug. After serving on a ...”

“... famous The Mind of the South: ‘in this society ... in which nearly the whole body of whites, young and old, had constantly before their eyes the example, had constantly in their ears the accent of the Negro, the relationship between the two groups was, by the second generation at least, nothing less than organic. Negro entered into white man as ...”