“... than his poems. The last third of Kirkup’s book is given to the account of a love affair with a young American, ‘the most beautiful creature I had ever seen’, which is described movingly, although with some characteristic exaggeration. (‘I could be both Verlaine and Rimbaud. He was always Rimbaud.’) The two wrote poems together, and for a time Dana ...”

“... into which the Armed Forces were always reluctant to enter, he turned to Zuckerman and to the young men in the PUS’s secretariat: figures like Frank Cooper and Michael Quinlan, who were themselves to become powerful Permanent Secretaries in the course of time. Financial stringency meant that the high-spending Services ...”

“... we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats.’ If Tom Frayn had had his way, his son, Michael, would have joined this company of enthusiasts or, better still, have opened the batting for England at the Oval. Many hours were spent on back-garden coaching but the boy proved a serious disappointment. Looking back, seven decades later, he blames the ...”

“... may not even be a problem. Mayer-Schönberger evokes Borges’s story of Funes the Memorious, a young man who as a result of an accident acquired something like perfect recall, and who ‘could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies’. ‘I have more memories in myself alone,’ he says, ‘than all men have had since the world was a world.’ This ...”

“... often become in movies about empires. Timothée Chalamet, by contrast, is a child rather than a young grown-up, and he remains a child, intelligent but frail. When he wins a crucial knife fight we know this is thanks to some close contact with the wizardly spice, or some secret teaching by his mother, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Both films are ...”

“... been trekking through the jungle for a day or two and (with the exception of David) aren’t as young as they were. Tempers fray, the men pick on each other’s weaknesses and begin to mistrust all motives except their own. They have found the body and the gold, and the gold is a heavy burden. Morally heavy too, since they have different ideas about what to ...”

“... finds a kind of truth in film fakery, even if she initially refuses to consider the film’s young star, Manon Lenoir (a name very close to that of the actress playing her, Manon Clavel), as any sort of reincarnation of Sarah. And we move from truth in falsehood to the idea of performance in truth, as relations between Fabienne and Lumir reach the point ...”

“... of beautiful trees; and then, again, the police at the crime scene. The third murder, that of a young boy, is announced by his smiling at the person he doesn’t know is about to kill him. That’s all we see until the police occupy the next shot.Who is it that we don’t see in these instances? This is where we arrive at the question belonging to ...”

“... Later shows a group of massive zombies killing a priest, who is mysteriously smiling and passes a young boy a cross to remember him by. The priest is sure that this is the end of the world and is ready to welcome it as such.It’s not the end of the world, but the world has changed. The virus has spread beyond Britain, and continental European nations have ...”

“... The double acting was well done.Chalamet is the perfect actor for this part. He looks ridiculously young, never takes his glasses off and projects a timeless innocence. The reaction of the actress Kay Stone (played by Gwyneth Paltrow with a calm that belongs to no one else in the film) is that of many of us. She meets him at the Ritz in London, and knows he is ...”

“... fluency and suggestiveness. Only a few hours elapse in the narrative. Nathan Zuckerman, the young author of some well-received short stories, spends an evening, night and morning at the New England home of a reclusive elder writer he esteems, E.I. Lonoff. The dates and other details of Nathan’s career tally with Roth’s own. Lonoff’s speciality has ...”

“... ones. The Rembrandts, the non-Rembrandts. The paintings of old people. The paintings of boys and young men. The paintings of old women. The self-portraits, the genre groups. I paid attention to the characterful frames, a wonderfully diverse array, some of them like no frames I have ever seen. I went back to my favourites, then round those pieces I thought I ...”

“... I don’t find that my children want to hear what things were like when I was young. Publishers, who are sometimes also parents, must find that their families don’t want to listen to them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years ...”

“... to work hard here. For Julia Phillips, and for everyone else, she says, ‘who thought they were young, decadent and rich in the Seventies’, the Seventies were the Eagles song ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, and a style modelled on the song. ‘The Seventies ... pot ’n’ coke’n’ incense,’ she also says; like the Sixties only higher. Phillips’s ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”