“... ill and to modernise the discipline of psychiatry, just as surgery had been brought up to date. Andrew Scull’s splendid new book, entertaining and disturbing in equal measure, is an account of the career of Henry Aloysius Cotton, an ebullient, ambitious American psychiatrist who met this challenge. Scull, whose usual territory is British asylums of the ...”

“... Liverpool, where Forfar was docked. It was the last contact she would ever have with her troubled young husband. 22a Woodstock Gardens Liverpool Dear Molly This is the first time I had the opportunity to write. I couldn’t send anything as I promised because I got into some trouble and got my pay stopped. I haven’t had the price of smokes since I got ...”

“... by storm. Her new manager is the teen-wrangler Louis Walsh, who can be seen making and breaking young hopefuls every Saturday night on the television show Popstars: The Rivals. Out of her troubles – and the overcoming of her troubles – Lulu has become poster-girl for a new generation of the enduringly ambitious. Her latest album went straight into the ...”

“... aristocratic, always about the business of raising himself and hiding himself, and, from a young age, brilliantly observing Britain from the top of his nose and the summit of Parnassus. From Blackpool in 1942: The best thing about this place is the potted shrimps one can buy for succour between performances! Not really a holiday attraction, of ...”

“... himself NaturalSelector89, Natural Selector, Sturmgeist89 and Sturmgeist. His heroes were the young men who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... flat so it’s impossible to prove it otherwise. Wallace had not picked his adversary well, as his young wife found out when she received a letter from Mr Hampden: ‘Madam – If your infernal thief of a husband is brought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to pulp, you will know the reason.’ Wallace’s work is consistently ...”

“... at the ongoing sanctions, the blockade was destroying the underpinnings of Iraqi society as young people lost hope and sought relief through emigration or immersion in religious fundamentalism.The sanctions were always publicly justified as a means to get Saddam to relinquish any and all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In fact, he had ...”

“... of good behaviour. The ‘Christless code’ of pistols at dawn does not rate a mention in Andrew St George’s The Descent of Manners, a study of ‘the subtle binding codes that ruled all aspects of 19th-century life’. His concern is only with the middle classes, who had their own sense of honour but were less ready to create widows and orphans ...”

“... on the book. Much of his work is now available in English, smoothly and wittily translated by Andrew Bromfield. Pelevin has a relentlessly black sense of humour, and a satirical touch and use of the fantastic reminiscent of Bulgakov. His mastery of street language goes with a gift for extravagant simile: the sky is ‘like an old, worn mattress drooping ...”

“... the poem from its own world.In this short book produced for the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series Andrew Motion has written the best biographical and critical study of Larkin so far. He understands his subject as a poet, as an admirer and to some extent a follower, who has also taken part in studies of the Movement group of poets ...”

“... to play Scripps the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes in like the wind has blown the door open and knows the scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this ...”

“... of an infant boy, a photographer who kills her model by photographing him to death, a young girl who dies laughing at the sight of the miniature guillotine she has commissioned for the consummation of her love affair with death, a fetishist: distilled from their embodiments as stories, Tournier’s subjects may appear outlandish and bizarre. The ...”

“... have her V-plates intact … the age-old requisite for future queen consorts.’ The equation of young women and toilets is gross and the far side of misogyny but it’s only to be expected in a tampophiliac family with a fondness for ‘robust’ wardroom language, a capacious repository of bodily fluid gags and lavatory jokes, and a subscription to a ...”

“... as a regular while on National Service in 1953, inspired by the Coronation of a ‘very pretty young woman who was our new Queen’. It rejoices later over the memory of ‘being presented to the lovely Queen Mother’. So, though patriotism doesn’t figure in Price’s account of emotions during battle, we can’t assimilate him to a fourth sort of a ...”