“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... in great houses ... and his assumption into a kind of artistic establishment in England.’ The young Yeats had known John O’Leary, who despite his long political exile remained a representative of ‘a free-thinking Catholic intelligentsia’ capable of dialogue with those ‘few educated men’ of the Protestant Ascendancy. But the decline of Ascendancy ...”

“... the fascinating and secretive British-American Project for a Successor Generation, which instructs young and friendly natives, who look likely to climb the provincial ladder of power, on the advantages of following the American way. Do you begin to see the outline of a political class? A bickering and faintly risible élite, whose ranks are filled with old ...”

“... had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them what every reader wants to know: what happens after the book’s last page, or play’s last scene? It’s unusual to have so close a glimpse of the offstage author spinning consequences (and since Austen was only entertaining her ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...”

“... though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster.Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...”

“... Already by the turn of the 1960s, it was paying less attention to these than the levy of young radicals who would go on to produce the peculiarly Italian phenomenon of operaismo, one of the strangest intellectual adventures of the European left of the period.* Unlike the PCI, the postwar PSI had possessed at least one major figure, Rodolfo ...”

“... of hostages being slaughtered. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men who describe you as the sheikh of the slaughterers etc. They do not express the views of most people who admire and support the resistance in Iraq.’ Earlier this year al-Qaida supporters in Jordan told me that not only were they finding it more ...”

“... a ubiquitous political signifier. On 30 August the literary scholar M.M. Kalburgi was shot by two young men pretending to be students, after he had allegedly made offensive remarks about idol worship. Men like his killers are now in abundant supply in India. They manufacture abuse on social media against anyone faintly critical of Modi; they instruct those ...”

“... protected against stroke. By the mid-1980s Douglas had retired, his cohort taken over by Michael Wadsworth. The Douglas ‘babies’ were by then in their late thirties, and Wadsworth showed that high blood pressure and obesity were more common among those who’d been underweight as babies. There were, it seemed, patterns and cycles to ...”

“... why I want to prolong my childhood so badly.’ At the age of twelve, she writes:Once I was young and all aglow,full of laughter and fun.I was like a blushing rose.Now I am old and forgotten.This world-weariness, the desire to self-mythologise, is easier to take when one remembers what Ditlevsen is up against. Despite her academic achievements, she is ...”

“... art and literature. He might also be called ridiculous. Nobody was more warmly encouraging to any young writer or painter who promised to transcend the bounds of everyday life. In the Forties he was excited by the rattling rhetoric of the Apocalyptic poets, believing that the day of Audens and MacNeices was over, that poetry ‘must now be positive and ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”