“... enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music ...”

“... a looming food security problem. Africa was the obvious target: a continent of one billion mostly young inhabitants – two billion by 2050 – and 60 per cent of the earth’s uncultivated land, plus one third of its mineral riches. The aftermath of the Cold War allowed Beijing to come in with a low bid for Africa. In the early 1990s, after the demise of the ...”

“... Biggs in the LRB of 22 March 2012). Here and there in her book, Cusk muses on Greek myth: her two young daughters are ‘interested in the ancient Greeks. They have a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology … When they talk about it it’s as though they are talking about something they personally remember.’ She turns to Freud, who viewed the formation of ...”

“... Child-Who-Was-Tired’, then, is really a palimpsest, not unlike the Picasso Head of a Young Man (1906), where the gouache is laid thickly over a Japanese wood-block print, but not so thickly that one cannot see lines of the original like folds in the paper – creating a visual effect analogous to papier-mâché, at a time when Picasso’s ...”

“... which Sayers sews up the Trinitarian response to life that might, if one were very drunk, or very young, or very stupid, make one suppose that she was thinking. The mystery of her ‘life and soul’ – since she was quite obviously no fool – is why she thought she was thinking. In her chapter on Free Will, Sayers allows us to know that in Murder Must ...”

“... like Dickens, is creator, showman, and commentator on his world. It was this relation that the young Dostoevsky set out to subvert, promising himself and the critics that the youthful author’s ‘ugly mug’ would be nowhere visible in Poor People, a novel mostly in letters. (That form, too, Dostoevsky utterly subverts, making the novel a predecessor of ...”

“... For all his new-found faith in other people, Fallada went on to write two self-centred novels: Young Goedeschal, an exercise in expressionism, and Anton and Gerda, a semi-autobiographical work about a short-sighted young man in his early thirties. Neither was particularly successful, critically or commercially. The pen ...”

“... into transcendental meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She only ...”

“... theory film based on the notion that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, Joely plays the young Elizabeth I and Vanessa plays the old version. Later this year, Joely’s 21-year-old daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her first feature film, The Two Faces of January, adapted from Patricia Highsmith. (The casting director has claimed to have been ...”

“... became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am ...”

“... among them. ‘Extraordinary to think that Günter Grass roamed this city on his scooter as a young boy in shorts,’ one of the characters in Homeland reflects. By ‘shorts’ she’s probably not thinking of him dressed as a Hitler Youth but Kempowski may have been, if only as a naughty joke. Grass didn’t own up to his Nazi past until 2006 and even ...”

“... impulses of an evil empire’. He introduced those final thoughts with the story of ‘a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California’: ‘I love my little girls more than anything,’ Reagan said he said, but ‘I would rather see my little ...”

“... intellect by developing a version of ‘learning’ which involves no active thought but makes young ladies look clever at parties. Being able to quote from ‘approved authors’ like Martial, knowing by heart the full pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses and parroting the ‘acknowledged authority’ on Homer are all forms of performative smartness that ...”

“... in the 1960s and early 1970s Johnson was, as Coe’s publishers maintain, ‘one of the best-known young novelists in Britain’, but his celebrity quickly faded. Now, as this large biography attests, there has been a revival of interest. Coe has worked on his book for years, occasionally lamenting the loss of time that might have been devoted to writing ...”

“... troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ones!’ In the days after the invasion some ...”