“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life. Certainly the letters exhibit him at the top of his form as an extravagant, debt-ridden young dandy and adventurer. There are, too, some vivid letters to his family in 1830/31 from Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu, Albania, Greece, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria. Many of them have been already published, either by Monypenny and Buckle, or in ...”

“... Stein and Alice Toklas, for Vlaminck, Braque and Derain. One night the unstoppably talkative Robert Delaunay came over with his mother, a countess: he was a young painter under the spell of Cézanne who had dropped out of school and done a stint as an apprentice set designer in Belleville. Sonia and ...”

“... curricula. To read the poems in youth is still an intoxicating experience, for he is very much a young person’s poet: but comparatively few of the poems mature and increase in our understanding with age. Like the work of Butterfield or Ninian Comper, their bright apparatus feels fixed in the museum of the past. So many Victorian things do; it seems a ...”

“... in chains and confined to prison. On 15 August, in the late afternoon, he and another prisoner, a young boy named Cézar, were digging a trench close to the island’s administrative headquarters. Giraud and Cézar were chained together. At about 5 o’clock a group of French officials crossed the square. Among them were the Intendant of the island, a ...”

“... life rather than art to art, or fiction to fiction. In two respects, unfortunately, Fatherland by Robert Harris makes artistic comparisons inescapable. It belongs, first, to that select genre of fiction which deals in the Alternative Present, or in this case an alternative recent past. It is set in 1964 in the vast, imperial, intimidating Berlin of an ...”

“... It seems that the likes of Edward Larocque Tinker, Robert P. Swierenga and Colonel John S. ‘Rip’ Ford have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the cowboy world, and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas* sets out to illuminate the structures and processes behind the historical underpinning behind those who wear spurs ...”

“... heavy drinking and writing was forged. When I thought of poetry I thought of drink. There was Robert Burns, after all, and his skirling, birling Tam O’Shanter. There was Hugh MacDiarmid and his drunk man looking at the thistle. And there were all those Scots poets meeting in Milne’s Bar in Edinburgh, pouring whisky down their necks and poison in one ...”

“... was William Camden’s ponderous official history, then the influential courtier biographies by Robert Naunton, Froude’s probing critique, the rigorous constitutionalism of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the ...”

“... children survived to adulthood; and eight were left behind when the eldest escaped to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 (two sons, including the father’s namesake, had died six years earlier). Moulton-Barrett did not attempt to hoard girl-children only, although the legend surrounding his daughter’s elopement has sometimes suggested that. The sex of the ...”