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“... Alasdair MacIntyre, free at the time of supernatural baggage, who could tell Kautsky from Korsch. Michael Kidron, a sardonic sophisticate with a refined taste in political economy. John Palmer, a polymathic journalist capable of synthesising the latest news into crystalline agitational prose. Eamonn McCann, a street-fighter from Derry with amazing literary ...”

“... village, once almost a no-go area, a deputy is murdered underground, and the chief suspect is a young miner whom Ellie Pascoe has been teaching. The notorious paternoster at Sheffield University is figured against the pithead winding-gear and its cages, an infernal rosary counting the men down into the dark, and carrying splinters of darkness back into the ...”

“... teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. Süskind’s nasal rhapsody was an unexpected but quite logical best-seller ...”

“... Greene, and by informers like Baines and Cholmeley – were just the opposite. They show him as a young man who constantly and recklessly broadcast heretical, free-thinking views. He considered religion a political tool to ‘keep men in awe’. He persuaded people to atheism, ‘willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins’. Even allowing for ...”

“... to his home, sounding out his chances of the job and embellished with an arch little story of young Roy saving up the bus fare from Edmonton to visit, and fall in love with, the museum. It is hard to feel much sympathy for either side in this quarrel (though, if you had to choose, Pope-Hennessy’s case is much the more plausible). There is a genuine ...”

“... inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon as possible. Good journalists should not waste time producing bad PhD theses. In the academic context there is some reason for the success of pseudo-scientific ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... wartime and domestic diaries, his infantile contributions to school magazines (‘Awake! oh you young men of England/For if, when your country’s in need,/You do not enlist by the thousand/You truly are cowards indeed’ – this written c.1914). For the first time, we get the complete texts of such marginalia. These early items are signed ‘Eric ...”

“... In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on Thackeray by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning ...”

“... only precariously united kingdom, Boswell played the parts of an Edinburgh advocate and of a ‘young laird’ who was heir to the estates of Auchinleck. He was a reasonably successful lawyer, popular in the Faculty for his eloquence, wit and rakishness; he had figured in the greatest civil trial of his times, the ‘Douglas Cause’ over the rightful ...”

“... this case it was the famous romantic novel by Bernardin de St Pierre, Paul et Virginie, in which a young couple are brought up together in the beauties of the tropic wilderness, are all in all to each other, and die together before any hint of sexuality can appear in their relations. William knew the book well, and so did Dorothy. This has been mentioned ...”

“... the land preaching modernisation and progress. His style with the press was flattering to young reporters. He would single us out by Christian name at press conferences, and refer to articles we had written in order to show that he had read them. He seemed to have read everything. He would seldom, on those long railway journeys or over a nightcap in ...”

“... the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because he is not content to fool around, playing one ...”

“... politically correct thought police. Rupert Bear is a racist, offensive character who is poisoning young minds ... Move over Rupert ... there’s more candidates for Nutwood.’ The editors’ first priority is to make all 30 pages of the paper appeal to the punters, but their most important political object is to help the Tories move further to the ...”

“... to buy it was to hand. ‘Wage and income restrictions, price increases and unemployment among young people and women sent average household incomes plummeting to levels of twenty years before.’ After 1984 inflation rose by 50 per cent a year, and very soon by much more. The outlook had become unrelievedly desperate and everyone knew it: except, it ...”