“... 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 ...”

“... been in the game a long time. Walter Benjamin saw it as the stories which the old recount to the young, and its disintegration in modern times seemed to him one of the most grievous forms of human poverty. The warning that experience is fading from the modern world is sounded all the way from Heidegger to Adorno. The ‘eternal now’ of modern urban ...”

“... century earlier; many of his ideas about painting were formed in front of them. With Barzizza the young Alberti became adept not merely in reading classical literature but in imitating it so successfully that his early play, Philodoxeos Fabula, was widely credited as a work of antiquity. Grafton shows how he also learned to incorporate classical references ...”

“... her shoulders’, walked the streets crying ‘four bunches a penny’; and mudlarks, principally young boys, girls, old men and many old women, who spent the day with ‘their trousers tucked up, groping about picking out pieces of coal, iron, wood and copper nails’ from the mud on the banks of the Thames. Unlike the street-sellers, whose lives were ...”

“... were supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in Dante’s Inferno. The area was in unruly border country, and it is also on the spine of Scotland, where the waters divide to flow west or east. James Laidlaw’s grandfather Will O’Phaup followed fairies one evening into ...”

“... suggestion. He proposes that we should take seriously the fact that Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, the young and beautiful Roman nobleman with whom Michelangelo fell in love and for whom he made a spectacular series of meticulously finished drawings with mythological (and cryptically allegorical) subjects – the Ganymede, Tityus, Fall of Phaeton and Children’s ...”

“... Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the Northern Ireland crisis came closer than ever before or since to carnage. Levels of mob as well as of subversive violence were high. In Dublin two thousand ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... Guevara was more interested in medicine than in Peronist, or indeed continental, politics. As a young man, he apparently advised the maids in his parents’ house to vote for Perón on the grounds that his policies favoured their ‘social class’ – a formulation which suggests that Perón had little to offer the comfortably-off Guevara family. (Very ...”

“... human and to be active. Perhaps the slogan should be rephrased ‘right to rites’. For what the young unemployed in our increasingly atomised society miss out on is the rites of passage, the seasonal rituals, the means of self-definition provided by sub-cultures. In The Historical Meanings of Work, Patrick Joyce and his contributors concern themselves with ...”

“... 1929, when Beckett was 23, and 1940. Those years were troubled by a dilemma that threatened the young man’s mental health. Beckett’s parents had wanted him to get involved in the family quantity surveying business; instead he studied languages and in 1928 went to Paris as a young academic. It seemed a sensible ...”

“... sense, but a kind of greed. Janisch, the country policeman, is a good-looking man, not young but intensely attractive to women, and he exploits this to seduce them, usually by pulling them over on mountain roads for minor traffic offences, then propositioning them. His preferred prey are single women of a certain age, and his ostensible goal in ...”

“... in Buñuel’s film fifty years earlier. As an example of joyous peasant culture, we see local young men vying to pull the head off a chicken suspended on a wire across the street. We see a filthy pig wallowing on the banks of the stream that runs through the village and then watch a child drink water from it. The peasants, who are superstitious, will only ...”

“... in England and Wales (Scotland had to wait until 1980 and Northern Ireland until 1982): When I was young society seemed so totally restrictive I found that the time I did not spend on the piers or bath houses wasted. The heterosexuality of everyday life enveloped and asphyxiated me. I numbed myself to this life – something which all gay men and women do even ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”