“... years after Michelangelo. Aged about twenty, Sebastiano became attracted by the work of another young local artist, Giorgione. Almost everything associated with Giorgione is now a matter of controversy, but there is general agreement about the identification of most of Sebastiano’s surviving pictures from his time in Venice. These are well represented in ...”

“... got it right: she had seen it all before under the microscope.In​ 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown undertook an investigation into the pollen of Clarkia pulchella, a straggly plant with slender pale purple petals that splay out like chicken feet. Placing the pollen grains in water, he saw through the microscope that they were ‘very evidently in ...”

“... unpopular decisions about rearmament. More sympathetically, though with some equivocation, G. M. Young in his official ‘life’ suggested that, whatever the faults of Baldwin’s substantive policies, he at least deserved credit for having forged a united political nation, able to meet the crisis of 1940. Few have been prepared to see much virtue in ...”

“... attention to powerful figures such as Trevelyan and the two prime ministers of the period, Robert Peel and John Russell, he believes that no individual should be held responsible for the way the British government handled the famine. The real culprit was the imperial capitalist system. He offers a fresh interpretation of Peel’s decision to import ...”

“... looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the sonnets, whose notion of willing sacrifice in a noble cause had unerringly caught the public mood in this early ...”

“... politics and criticism is temperamentally and operatively different from the Trillings’, young Podhoretz, nimbly adaptable to any suck-up opportunity for advancement, activates his overachiever superpower. ‘I became a Leavisian – not, perhaps, the most ardent of his young epigoni at Cambridge, but, in all ...”

“... new object, photographic, installation, trad fig. Since 1992 he’s been prominently showcasing young British artists, the objects of much attention and controversy lately. Surely some kind of indicative statement might have been expected. And this is what (ìn part) he said: ‘I’m not sure what today’s young artists ...”

“... year’, ‘The Eve of St Mark’, could easily be re-titled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Reading’: so suggestively inward and original is its image of a young person wholly absorbed in a poem, one chilly spring evening in a small country town, where she sits by the window in an old house trying to ...”

“... Child-Who-Was-Tired’, then, is really a palimpsest, not unlike the Picasso Head of a Young Man (1906), where the gouache is laid thickly over a Japanese wood-block print, but not so thickly that one cannot see lines of the original like folds in the paper – creating a visual effect analogous to papier-mâché, at a time when Picasso’s ...”

“... which Sayers sews up the Trinitarian response to life that might, if one were very drunk, or very young, or very stupid, make one suppose that she was thinking. The mystery of her ‘life and soul’ – since she was quite obviously no fool – is why she thought she was thinking. In her chapter on Free Will, Sayers allows us to know that in Murder Must ...”

“... fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew Ford, friends as well as enemies. Robert Lowell, who met him through Allen Tate near the end of his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told ...”

“... two of my favourites, the first drawn from his own very fine biography of Iain Macleod, where the young Powell (then learning to fox-hunt, and riding in full scarlet gear to the hunt and back on the Tube) is coached by his flatmate, the natural charmer Macleod, in how to behave with Tory constituency selection committees. Even at Wolverhampton ...”

“... the wannest of smiles, nowadays, to greet the announcement that the Arts Council is subsidising a young artist to make piles of rubbish in the ‘back streets’ of Bootle? Mrs Huxley trades too much on the comic stereotypes of the English scene, and only in a splendidly disorganised ‘Bed Race’ towards the end of the novel does her satire strike a ...”

“... like Dickens, is creator, showman, and commentator on his world. It was this relation that the young Dostoevsky set out to subvert, promising himself and the critics that the youthful author’s ‘ugly mug’ would be nowhere visible in Poor People, a novel mostly in letters. (That form, too, Dostoevsky utterly subverts, making the novel a predecessor of ...”

“... off the sauce and emerged a moody, ruthless, middle-aged puritan – is introduced thus: ‘As a young man he was an unforgettable sight, once described by James Fenton in the New Statesman... ’ Yet Fenton’s description of the unforgettable ‘young’ Ingrams was actually written in 1976, nine years after the booze ...”