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“... to forget that Crick ever set it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the closing page of The Bard that ...”

“... trauma, psychological numbing, amnesia, insomnia or other forms of automatic arousal. Readers of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon or Pat Barker should not be surprised that this description of PTSD turns out to have a strong resemblance to the description of shell-shock that has become part of the modern literary tradition: the psychiatrists are, after ...”

“... it strange to read an entry headed ‘Anomie’ that made no mention of Emile Durkheim or of Robert Merton. ‘Anomy’ is declared obs. by the OED but the French variant anomie stands for a sort of sociological deficiency disease: it refers to the ‘lost’ and rootless state of an individual or community that lacks norms of behaviour and behavioural ...”

“... dots?’ Harry, of course, has many sentimental moments in these novels. ‘Our tears are always young,’ he thinks, after a depressing visit to Ruth, who is now old (he no longer sees Ruth, but suspects she may have borne him a daughter). Or, feeling lost in space, as he sometimes does, he thinks of ‘what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby’s ...”

“... not remember history before Thebes and the Trojan War, if not because the world was comparatively young?For all this, it’s hard to escape the sense that Lucretius is prevaricating about when the apocalypse will come. As often as he hints that his readers may themselves witness the world’s collapse, he offers a reminder that the earth’s youth argues ...”

“... J. C. his meed of lectures, tutorials and research students. Nevertheless, the book-addicted young, the Colin Wilsons of our time, find John Cowper instantly available in the heart of London, at the Village Bookshop, hard by Piccadilly Circus, that alternative campus. There is here a bust of John Cowper, with large pictures of his photogenic face. There ...”

“... For a hero, Alderman Roberts may be lacking in style. ‘A cautious, thrifty fellow’ is how Hugo Young describes him and it’s easy to tell he isn’t impressed. But Alfred Roberts was an imposing figure in Grantham and his businesses worked at a time when a great many failed. What we chiefly know of his wife, the elusive Beatrice, is that her daughter ...”

“... outside the city with his wife and three children. He was also beginning a relationship with a young, dark-haired woman named Robin Benedict who worked as a prostitute in a bar called Good Time Charlie’s which is in the Combat Zone, Boston’s red-light district. Benedict disappeared in 1983 and today her family mourns the loss of a daughter they never ...”

“... a period role, indeed vanished, while we’re caught up in the shipboard romance of two strangers, Robert and Penny. More than that, we’re inside Robert’s head: ‘He noticed how snatches of illumination leaked out from the decks below ... He felt they were bathed in a wordless beauty that did not belong in the ...”

“... objectionable conduct in a public street may well be regarded by another person, particularly a young woman, as conduct which insults her by suggesting that she is somebody who would find such conduct in public acceptable herself.’ Goodrich quite rightly goes after Glidewell’s opinion hammer and tongs. But what is most interesting about his discussion ...”

“... expect to get rather low, even understated scores on this machine. I tell myself that pinball is a young man’s game. When I was a postgraduate student at London University, I used to get up at 11, walk over to the School of Oriental and African Studies and, if no one had done so already, switch on the pinball machine in the corner of the junior common room ...”

“... roller-skating is fun for the whole family, promotes health and happiness, and is the sport of the young and the clean-living. The paradigmatically youthful, clean-living skater does warm-up exercises first, observes rink etiquette, is alert and courteous at all times and gives way to pedestrians. Undesirable acquaintanceships are, by implication ruled ...”

“... unbearably cutesy and the downright clichéd is one problem. When we first meet her, Manna is a young woman ‘with a pixieish smile’ or, in a clumsy alternative, ‘with a vivacious face smiling radiantly’. As she lies awake at night, thinking of Lin (who is ‘well read in chivalric novels’, and whose ‘pale face was smooth and handsome’), her ...”

“... in extended flashbacks, in the foreground she has a handsome role in the sexual initiation of a young American male. But this is only to say that no great novel has yet been made out of the era of the death camps. As the era slips further into the past, it will go on being appropriated like any other for all the trickery and distortions of art – it has no ...”

“... which Mann fleshes out the story of Moses. In this version, Pharaoh’s daughter is a lubricious young woman who fancies a sweaty and muscular Hebrew labourer, takes him to bed, conceives by him, and promptly has him murdered so he can’t tell anyone. The child to whom she gives birth is sent out to be nursed by Jochebed, as in Exodus, though here the ...”