“... of whom objected when the high-rises were finally demolished in 2007.) A ribbon dangled over the young fathers teasingly adapts Jesus’s words to read: ‘In my Mother’s house there are many mansions.’ The insertion of this heraldic device suggests an aspiration: Marshall would like his picture to come across not so much as a gallery artwork, but as a ...”

“... the gods, about tyranny, freedom and political change, and about a slow path to maturity for one young man (Orestes) and an entire culture. That ‘maturity’ turns out to involve the subordination of women and of the family, which is conceived as feminine, to enable the creation of a political community like real-life historical Athens, in which male ...”

“... for the NME at the turn of the 1980s, when the weekly had a gigantic circulation among the young, Penman was a partisan of the ‘Dreamers, awake!’ theory manifest in post-punk and the new pop that followed it. It was a time when the NME’s writers could make an argument about the urgent need to fuse Brecht with Chic in one issue, and identify a ...”

“... other Grenadiers when they dumped the charred carcass of the jeep on the ground next to us. Some young soldiers then put rubber gloves on and pulled the soldiers’ kit out of the jeep and laid it out on the floor. Most of it was burned black and soaked with what I assumed must have been blood. Jack Mizon was sent to the psychiatrist to check that he’s ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other ...”

“... the dust-heap the remains of the Christmas pudding (‘idolatrous confectionery’) offered to young Edmund by the servants. The equivalent moment in The Recognitions hardly measures up: a guest invited for Wyatt’s fourth birthday brings a plus one, so under pressure from Aunt May (who has apparently baked an exact number of slices) Wyatt must sacrifice ...”

“... obsessed with the cinema, and with American rock music in those favouring Sixties. They started young and went to film school, directing their first features at the end of that decade, each thus joining a rising group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... million marching in Hong Kong was even more significant than one million demonstrating in Beijing. David Owen warned that the involvement of the colony could be ‘very dangerous’. In early June a further demonstration damaged property and the Hong Kong riot police were sent in promptly. It was alleged, in language reminiscent of Beijing, that ‘criminal ...”

“... she has hope: ‘If we all manage to pull through in these next years, it’ll be thanks to young people who are willing to give their minds and hearts and bodies to make changes.’ This year, Luiselli published another book drawn from these experiences; this one, Lost Children Archive, is a novel. Many details are the same: a scene at the beginning of ...”

“... involves the contrast between the work published in her lifetime – which seems so aware, as David Kalstone put it, ‘of the smallness and dignity of human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run ...”

“... 17th-century poem of the same title in which ‘Bishop King/Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme/His young wife, lost before her time.’ Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper ...”

“... but his father was already dead, and his mother had other things on her mind besides her son. Young Isaac found consolation wherever he could: he dreamed of killing his mother, and burning the house down around her, and he took revenge on the other boys at Grantham grammar school by doing better at lessons than them. His mother wanted him to become a ...”