“... though the Street Offences Act had just been amended, it was still risking arrest to approach a young American boy asking: ‘What unit you from? Need a bed?’ Harry and I wrangled constantly over my neurotic concern for ‘security’: i.e. maintaining a decent level of tidiness at the house, if for no other reason than to keep the cops away. I balked at ...”

“... is interrupted by an occasional human moment. At one point a gunman walks down a row of kneeling young men with their hands tied behind them. He aims a pistol at the back of each man’s head, fires, watches the body slump forward in a pool of blood, moves on to the next in line and repeats the exercise. Then, one of his victims has the idea of trying to ...”

“... establishment Podemos refers to as ‘la casta’. The Podemos project began with a small group of young politics lecturers at Madrid’s Complutense University – Iglesias, along with Luis Alegre, Germán Cano, Juan Carlos Monedero and Iñigo Errejón – who were interested in the question of how to channel the energy of the indignados. Drawing on the ideas ...”

“... many gender nonconformists, some of the disabled and the ailing, many of the very old and the very young, and anyone else who is physically alive but civically lessened. He calls it an inhumanity, all too human, that we regularly visit on our own kind.First in his typology are people who simply vanish. Right away Heller-Roazen demonstrates his range, citing ...”

“... brayed a stentorian national call for the repression of pornography and for a ‘new generation of young people with clean minds and healthy bodies living in a better, cleaner America’. His exacting standards for FBI recruits – mandatory blond hair, blue eyes and slender waists – were of the Frederick the Great variety. And if you suspect what that may ...”

“... by a week. They would be embarrassed far more acutely when in the following year The Sorrows of Young Werther burst on the scene with its painfully obvious parallels, even to the name ‘Lotte’. The narrative was, as Lewes put it, ‘in many respects too close to reality not to be very offensive in its deviations from reality’. In connection with ...”

“... jewellery and expensive clothes overlaying a diet-starved body, and the same clawed, no longer young hands about which nothing can be done whatsoever. Here, however, she is able to hide them behind the thousands of document files that surround her, a solid wall of research material on which someone has plopped a clearly reluctant cat. As those who have ...”

“... of a deeply felt need to keep things in the family at all costs. Gindin notes acutely that as a young man Galsworthy was ‘paralysed by a division between what he observed and what he felt he was expected to be’; and if there is a cluster of metaphors evident throughout this long book it is one of paralysis, stiffness, rigidity. The theory certainly ...”

“... to save them from starving.’ But the story did not end there. When in 2002 the home secretary, David Blunkett, slipped into a bill a provision expressly empowering such action, the Human Rights Act required him to include a safety-net provision that the use of the power was not to result in inhuman or degrading treatment of the destitute. Mr Justice ...”

“... growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular retrospectives of Hollywood film noir, so I came to Bogart ...”

“... a shrunken population waited quietly for the council to repair broken doors and fences. The young, it was said, traded heroin if they needed cash for clothes and clubbing. The young with the energy to get out of their beds, that is. In May 2011, two days before the election, I could find not one poster in a ...”

“... ash trees had already been destroyed: a bleak piece of news until it transpired that most were young trees, still in the nursery or lately planted out. The Telegraph, too, was on a roll, having brandished the same figures and threatened the long-suffering British rambler – and his dog – with a life behind closed doors in a piece it ...”

“... distinctive sound, they also evinced a talent for supplying quotes of the sort that on-the-make young music critics hyperventilate over. Sometimes they styled themselves as folk artists, sometimes as a species of music-guided performance artist, sometimes as Musikarbeiter or ‘industrial music-workers’. Like many post-Warhol artists half in love with ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”