“... 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 ...”

“... had many familiar trappings: a busy fringe programme, a smattering of business sponsors, ambitious young men in sharp suits. But it also felt different from any party conference I’d attended before. The queue that snaked around the conference perimeter on the first morning had a giddy, almost nervous energy. It was overwhelmingly, if not ...”

“... the wannest of smiles, nowadays, to greet the announcement that the Arts Council is subsidising a young artist to make piles of rubbish in the ‘back streets’ of Bootle? Mrs Huxley trades too much on the comic stereotypes of the English scene, and only in a splendidly disorganised ‘Bed Race’ towards the end of the novel does her satire strike a ...”

“... off the sauce and emerged a moody, ruthless, middle-aged puritan – is introduced thus: ‘As a young man he was an unforgettable sight, once described by James Fenton in the New Statesman... ’ Yet Fenton’s description of the unforgettable ‘young’ Ingrams was actually written in 1976, nine years after the booze ...”

“... for a few hundred feet? How do you explain the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard, who pursued the mad ambition of space with rockets that lifted themselves only a few yards, before collapsing under their own contradictions? Even more remarkable are the interlinked stories of the two men who actually took humans into ...”

“... two of my favourites, the first drawn from his own very fine biography of Iain Macleod, where the young Powell (then learning to fox-hunt, and riding in full scarlet gear to the hunt and back on the Tube) is coached by his flatmate, the natural charmer Macleod, in how to behave with Tory constituency selection committees. Even at Wolverhampton ...”