“... It was explained to me afterwards that these dancers were ‘taken with the Spirit’. One young woman was a persistent dancer, and I recall being disappointed that she was among the least attractive women in the congregation (at 13, this was important). The frondy dresses worn by Christian women in the late Seventies and the visionary intensity gave ...”

“... set trauma on a new course. And psychoanalysis reciprocated the favour. Not only did analysts like Robert Jay Lifton and Bruno Bettelheim help construct the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of a traumatic event that could not fail to leave ‘a trace on the individual and collective memory’, they also developed a clinical entity, ‘survivor syndrome’ or ...”

“... That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero’s magic trees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome (to use a word from J.R.R.’s special vocabulary), it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something ...”

“... still be tolerably sure that you can earn a decent living and get home again when you like – a young man naturally wants to do that, even while he also takes himself seriously as an employable character; and there is no doubt that the great days for it, in the teaching profession, were between the two world wars. All you can say to a ...”

“... my most spiritual film.’ ‘Elaborate on that.’ ‘No.’) In an early short, The Alphabet, a young girl is hounded by the ABCs – ‘a little nightmare about the fear connected with learning’.But Lynch did have a distinctive approach to language; there were the mantric repeated phrases in each film, the backwards speech of Twin Peaks, and his own way ...”

“... anyone with half a mind for philosophy, it must have been bliss to be in Freiburg that year; for a young student it must have been heaven. And one of the lucky ones was a 22-year-old Jew from Lithuania called Emmanuel Levinas. He had been born in 1906 – which made him just six months younger than Sartre – and after spending his youth in the Ukraine became ...”

“... a slave-driver’s lash. Scots, in that sense, were the non-commissioned officers of empire; even Robert Burns, a sentimental abolitionist, planned to take a job in Jamaica as an overseer of slaves. The same myth suggested that Gaelic emigrants raised in a clan system had a special rapport with traditional societies. In fact, Highlanders behaved with ...”

“... side of the family with his father’s sense of himself as a would-be wealthy person.Scenes of the young Biden ingratiating himself to Republicans recur during a youth spent winging it, hustling, and depending on the kindness of a series of characters who, in the words of his letters of recommendation, took ‘a chance’ on him despite his ‘lousy ...”

“... prevent it. Six months earlier, Vivienne’s mother had cancelled her daughter’s engagement to a young man who had already been approved by her husband, and there was a good chance she would intervene again. She had reason to feel that marriage, and the possibility of offspring, were not advisable in her daughter’s case, given her history of recurrent ...”

“... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...”

“... in July 1974, which were recorded and released as David Live, and in August recorded the bulk of Young Americans there with a new line-up of musicians, including Carlos Alomar on guitar. When the tour resumed in the autumn, with many of the musicians from Philadelphia now on stage, Bowie ditched the elaborate set and changed his costume, performing in his ...”

“... Depestre; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; the French poet Louis Aragon; the French photographer Robert Doisneau; the Russian-Mexican painter Vlady Rusakov and his father, Victor Serge, hero of the anti-Stalinist left. Several of her works are lost, including The Commune, Louise Michel and Us, a film she worked on in the early 1970s and ‘Guns for ...”

“... for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy ardour he felt when he first met her as a young student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912. She was a spur to his imagination, as he tested out new words for deep feeling, and the object of some comic erotic-spiritual exercises. Take this letter from December 1935: ‘When I go to bed I shall imagine ...”

“... human blood ‘taken from a clean, happy and temperate adolescent’, or the milk of a healthy young woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of ...”

“... In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection ...”