“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But O’Neill followed up. He replied to the Democratic influencer Harry Sissons: ‘I’m telling you exactly what Betas like you will be used for: food and sex.’ Fucking and devouring, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... than those made available by the discipline as it is practised every day, in classrooms before young men and young women likely to be indifferent, or in journals whose audience is limited to the other three hundred people in the world who care whether or not Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost. To some extent this ...”

“... drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to Michael Herr, his friend and collaborator on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket), ‘there was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing.’ He told Herr in an exuberant moment that The Godfather must be the greatest movie ...”

“... Israeli soldier. Three weeks after the 1967 War, Avraham Shapira and Amos Oz, then a rising young author, were summoned to Labour Party headquarters. They were asked to make the demobilised soldiers from the kibbutzim break the wall of silence and discuss their war experience. Soldiers’ Talk (Siah Lohamim), the collection of interviews they ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... intro made Wilson’s heart stand still. Spector’s productions were a how-to manual for the young Brian Wilson as he conceived his own form of pop chorale. Like Spector, he would use the nonpareil session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and would record at Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. And for the equivalent of the ...”

“... of the Odyssey provides Homecoming’s starting point, its narrative core. The novel opens with a young boy, Peter Debauer, the narrator, shunted – as Schlink was – between his home in Germany and his Swiss grandparents, alighting on an unfinished novel that tells the story of a soldier who returns from the war, only to find his wife living with another ...”

“... unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady … Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that? Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real ...”

“... engineering students who had joined the Steinmetz Society, a discussion group affiliated with the Young Communist League. The accounts of the people who knew him then – though is it just because they know how the story ends? – emphasise his gullibility and unworldliness. Ethel’s brother David claimed that during the war Julius strode into the Russian ...”