“... 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 ...”

“... they entered Elizabeth’s court under the tutelage of Sidney’s father. With Edward Dyer the young friends formed that ‘happy trinity’ of poets, Sidney Striving with my mates in song, Mixing mirth our songs among. In 1577, the all too early peak of Sidney’s political career, Greville accompanied him on a mission to strengthen the co-operation of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... least on the face of it, be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to masturbate ...”

“... that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been female. These days there can be a blanket acceptance of behaviour that half a century ago would have been condemned no less unthinkingly. It’s still a double standard even when it seems to benefit you. The idea that the ...”

“... times were changing, and we might see his hopeful trend exemplified, a few years later, in the young Louis MacNeice. MacNeice studied philosophy under a pupil of Bradley’s, and spent part of one summer holiday ploughing through the required reading while staying in the South of France:I was very fond of Bradley’s dictum that every judgment … is a ...”

“... to straighten it out: it represents the consciously exercised preference of a lifetime. One of his young favourites, Harry Stafford, who was 18 when he and Whitman began to share a close attachment and, whenever opportunity offered, the same bed, reported to Traubel years later that when Whitman stayed at the Stafford home, ‘he would make a great mess of his ...”

“... 1934 he told his BBC listeners that ‘the spirit of the youth movement still inspires many of the young officers in the labour camps and fills many students with the belief that they are digging the foundations of a new German socialism.’ Not that Crossman, in praising what he called the ‘idealism’ of the Hitler Youth, shared these ideals himself. More ...”

“... jobs). As a manual of good practice it adds to rather than radically supplanting other such works. Michael Balint’s The Doctor, his Patient and the Illness, first published in 1957, makes many similar points about the importance of treating the whole patient rather than the single ailment. Its focus is on the doctor-patient relationship as an important part ...”

“... bohemian life – society misunderstands, ignores – faithless, feckless wife – dies young, in poverty – the Unmarked Grave. And this picture has of late been injected with new life and massively disseminated by the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, whose veneer of shocking realism and occasional flights of pure fancy hardly conceal its ...”

“... 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 ...”