“... He is living in Wiltshire within a stone’s throw of a large house in which a scarcely-disguised Stephen Tennant is, like England, gathering dust and going to seed. Nothing happens in the book, yet the writing is hypnotic. Naipaul has always had a mage-like quality, weaving a mystique both about himself and about the craft of writing. Theroux by contrast is ...”

“... of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee describes Lehmann as one of the ‘ambitious, thwarted, talented young men’ who ‘rubbed up against Leonard’s adamantine proprietariness and perfectionism ... It was a well-known joke among their friends that working at the Hogarth Press drove you mad.’ After seven months at the Press Lehmann made his first appearance ...”

“... gold torque at his throat. The third, somewhat behind them, was another Theodosius, the Count’s young son, leading a troop of bristling giants, at whom a gasp went up, for they were black Ethiopians. Then we were all roaring, as Theodosius stood safe on the quay, and, emerging from the crowds, came a file of white-robed priests bearing a high ebony ...”

“... former law lords who made the journey across Parliament Square and who dissented in the case of a young Anglo-Chilean couple denied entry by an age-based rule intended to inhibit forced marriages, which everyone accepted theirs was not. While the majority’s decision was that the research materials relied on by the Home Office failed entirely to justify the ...”

“... rather than paralysing, one needed to be a particular kind of person. Above all, one needed to be young. In the Soviet 1930s, as Schlögel writes, youth was a ‘habit of mind’. A future orientation was not only part of Zhdanov’s classic definition of Socialist Realism at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934; it was also an essential attribute for ...”

“... sociologically outclassed by its former jihadist allies. All over the north, throngs of unemployed young people have started to make a living from jihad and sharia enforcement. War and religion have become a sustainable way of life for them, as they have for the battle-tested combatants of various katibas who are also turning a profit as hostage-takers and ...”

“... Stephen Braude is a philosopher who thinks that the phenomenon of multiple personality teaches something about the human mind. Until recently he would not have had much of a phenomenon: a thin diet of 19th-century anecdotes, a little flurry of cases in France after 1875, and a few more described at greater length in America after the turn of the century ...”

“... itself and others. Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB’s implacable foe, the Afghan ...”

“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare. Can you put me through? Hello? … Hello?’ Then the line went dead ...”

“... of your own; suitable candidates for this role would be an admiring younger brother, or a young and loving wife whose humble social background and limited education guarantee that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious or unconscious, such was James Joyce’s strategy with regard to Dublin, to Ireland. From the age of 22 ...”

“... paper; another woman with a feather duster and an expression of unutterable boredom; and a voluble young man with mad eyes who conducts a tour. He shows us the drawing-room, the dining-room, the small bedroom where Pasternak died. A framed reproduction of his father’s portrait of Tolstoy hangs on the wall; on the bed lies a wilted bouquet of flowers, a ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black ...”

“... to dismiss six boys. They were found behind the tombstones with women of the serving class.’ The young Deedes found a job on the Morning Post. He felt sorry for the unemployed but lived in a Waughish world well removed from such miseries. He and his friends, finding a Mrs Trampleasure in the London phone directory, took turns ringing her to enquire about the ...”

“... elsewhere, a transformed movement continues to make its urgent and necessary claims. But the young have their own pictures of the past, and a fresh generation of feminists calls for new heroines. Elaine is interviewed by an aspiring journalist looking for a pioneer: ‘What I have to say is not altogether what she wants to hear. She’d prefer stories of ...”