“... why poets themselves celebrate poets who renounce writing. At university in the 1990s the coolest young poets I knew were reading Rimbaud and Oppen – two very great and very different writers who had in common their abandonment of the art (though Oppen’s was only temporary). Rimbaud stops at twenty or so and starts running guns; Oppen is silent for 25 ...”

“... from egotistical doodles by squads of professional taggers and spray-can bandits. I watched a young man directing, with all the panache of a cadet Pasolini, his crew of despoilers, as they whitewashed the bricks for his latest intervention: a naked male slumped on a bench, Minotaur’s head superimposed, a hank of meat dripping from his paw. TIME TO ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... detail, the fairies, along with the other inhabitants of Fairyland – in the mid-19th century Michael Aislabie Denham listed more than 150 species, ‘hobbits’ included – gave the medieval Church more of a headache than has been admitted. The main problem, we might say nowadays, was that they were ‘inadequately theorised’. What were fairies? Where ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”

“... a Christian Sunday school. They would have retained at least the exciting bits, such as when the young hero David (destined to be the second king of the united kingdom of Judah and Israel) slew the mighty Philistine warrior Goliath, using only his skill with a sling and a few pebbles. These stories and the corpus of literature in which they are embedded have ...”

“... A gap of fifteen years between sections seems to set the mesh of the net too wide.In Seven Up!, Michael Apted chose a group of seven-year-olds and returned to his interview subjects at intervals of seven years. In 20 Sites n Years, a different sort of documentary project, Tom Phillips set out in 1973 to take pictures of twenty London streets on ...”

“... a radical disjuncture but a return to the perfection of the primitive church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert ...”

“... forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a confirmatory miracle. She is imprisoned by the authorities in a convent. Gabriel becomes a ...”

“... of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made ...”

“... philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the Duke of Windsor himself, to say nothing of the Duchess. Sarah Bradford’s biography of George VI portrayed him as the ultimate sacrificial ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...”

“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”

“... for more traditional school syllabuses or by more conventional behaviour on the part of the young. But all of that is happening on a more modest scale. It could become less modest if there was a real threat to the stability of society – for instance, from an escalation of inner-city rioting. But for the moment the shift has been not from Progress to ...”