“... book and written almost entirely at this pitch of judgment. Even its composition was heroic: a young man from the poor Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn, just graduated from City College, teaching courses at night and reviewing books as they came along to help pay the bills, going to the enormous reading room, Room 315, at the Fifth Avenue flagship of ...”

“... leisured classes, students, ex-students, dole bandits and freeloaders with the habit of literacy. Young lecturers, intense in leather jackets, peddled Raworth. ‘Read Raworth and Harwood,’ they said. ‘They’re the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers ...”

“... bourgeoisie, buying inoculation for their children and, if they hadn’t had the disease when young, for themselves. Inoculation came to seem safe enough, though there were notable and well-publicised accidents: the earl of Sunderland’s son died after being inoculated and so did a footman of the earl of Bathurst – ‘a strong, hail ...”

“... 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a ...”

“... academics aren’t sufficiently focused on preparing their students for the labour market and that young people are being duped into studying subjects that won’t deliver ‘good outcomes’ in the form of future earnings. Rishi Sunak’s recent pledge to ‘crack down on rip-off university courses’ (defined as those whose graduates haven’t entered a ...”

“... a friend. There comes a time when a woman freely publicises her age so that people can say: ‘How young you look!’ It seems to have come later than most to Colette, but when it did, she gloried in it.In tandem with this characteristically, if rather Hollywood, Edwardian career, two writers are growing within her. One writes, in 1910, La Vagabonde, a novel ...”

“... we might connect his prodigious if uneven writing with his dizzying array of concerns.Like many a young writer, Morris already had an income. When he came of age in 1855, he began drawing an annuity of £900. His father, a bill broker turned gentleman who bought his own coat of arms, had died in 1847, leaving the family his mining investments. Although Hanson ...”

“... even where it presumably hurts them to do so; both the Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George and Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact, spoke out against the suspension of Dean while objecting strongly to her views. But notably absent from the letter in support of Dean were the signatures of many prominent free-speech warriors, including ...”

“... the empire. Until the war began, tolerance and compromise kept many of those visions on hold. In Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna just before the war and a monument to the Habsburg polity, Ulrich, the protagonist, has been ‘accustomed his whole life long to expect politics to bring about not what needed to happen, but rather ...”

“... the beginning of its economic and cultural decline. In Heliopolis, a new film by Ahmed Abdallah, a young man doing research on ‘minorities’ in pre-revolutionary Egypt befriends an elderly Jewish woman; in a striking documentary sequence, a group of old people fondly remember a time when local shops were run by Jews and Greeks. If Egyptians long for an ...”

“... of the sheer demographic magnitude of a struggle that brought together hundreds of thousands of young men, from scattered and often isolated places, and exposed them to new pathogens, poor food, harsh weather and concentrated filth. Non-battle deaths are also a consequence of race and of racism. The 180,000 black men who fought for the Union were more ...”

“... of her. The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as ...”

“... against aspiring newcomers. The musical Hamilton exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’ President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving the theatre, calling on the new administration ‘to ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting weights ...”