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“... in his own being gave him the certainty that he contained millions, the whole swarming body of young America. ‘Your very flesh shall be a great poem,’ he wrote in 1855 in the Preface to Leaves of Grass, ‘not only in its words but ... in every motion and joint of your body.’ Including the penis, if you happened to be a man – ‘This poem drooping ...”

“... these answers can be found at the back of the book. It is a deeply duplicitous thing to teach our young, many of whom will grow up assuming that the principles of the school text apply to their entire life and all its problems. It is contrary to the scientific method, for in science, as in life, there can be no assurance that a question has an answer. If we ...”

“... tense is often used to add immediacy to childhood memoirs and to dramatise the trials of being young: not ‘I felt bad’ but ‘Woe is me’. Here it’s more inclusive – a stab at empathy and a recognition (available only in retrospect) that adults are human, too. ‘You know who’ll miss her most?’ Frayn’s father howls, between the departure of ...”

“... to a footballer, Garry Flitcroft (widely known as Garry Who?). Flitcroft, a married man with two young children, had had affairs with two women who had sold their stories to the Sunday People. The salacious article which the lifting of the injunction allowed the Sunday People to publish, and which the court had seen in draft, had no news value at all. As for ...”

“... of city dwellers) were under 30, the future – and even the present – belonged to the young. On the one hand, a ‘youth bulge’ and political pluralism; on the other, elite co-optation by the former metropolitan master. The two are incompatible. The number of ‘black French’ whom the lycée in Abidjan and the Sorbonne or the Ecole de guerre ...”

“... of roots, his generation’s is a poetry of rootlessness. One can see this from the first books of Stephen Romer (born like Hofmann in 1957) and Alan Moore (born 1960), and from the two outstanding contributors to New Chatto Poets, Adam Thorpe (born 1956) and Alan Jenkins (born 1955). One might call these four poets ‘sophisticated’, though this perhaps ...”

“... class of 30 12-year-old boys. Another English lesson: not Great Expectations this time, but Young Warriors by V.S. Reid. It is the first time the boys have seen the book, and there is a murmur of interest as the texts are handed out. ‘Who’s this geezer on the back?’ somebody asks. I explain that it’s a photo of the author. The ...”

“... The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting obedient attention from each new generation of students, but this form of academic perpetuity does not extend to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour ...”

“... in 1899, he split his time between the rich sporting set and the intellectuals, befriending Thoby Stephen, who similarly bridged the two, and many of those who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group. (Bell chased Thoby’s sister Vanessa for years; she agreed to marry him in 1906, on the day of Thoby’s funeral: he caught typhoid while on holiday in Greece ...”

“... humanity weep at these painful separations from everything, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it.’ Jackson was the son of an Ulster immigrant driven out of Ireland by English injustice, and he was speaking to the sons and daughters (and grandsons and granddaughters) of other immigrants, who knew what he ...”

“... histories had a separate genesis, and were intended for a very different purpose. W.T. Couch, the young head of the University of North Carolina Press, and soon to be director of the FWP for the south-eastern region, wrote to Alsberg in April 1938 proposing that the Project record ‘life histories of tenant farmers and their families’. But he wasn’t ...”

“... misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors. Alan Blyth has recorded reminiscences from 30 persons who ...”

“... Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition ...”

“... of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great ...”

“... He is living in Wiltshire within a stone’s throw of a large house in which a scarcely-disguised Stephen Tennant is, like England, gathering dust and going to seed. Nothing happens in the book, yet the writing is hypnotic. Naipaul has always had a mage-like quality, weaving a mystique both about himself and about the craft of writing. Theroux by contrast is ...”