“... to make one of Murray’s central subjects. One harsh poem in Conscious and Verbal describes a young Murray desperately embarrassed in Sydney, ‘feeling abashed by proper people’: the feeling, like the poem, Murray calls ‘Big Shame’. Sometimes I wish he were more easily embarrassed by his own phrases, and less so by the life against which they ...”

“... to be politicians as poets, or indeed judges or bishops, lords or commoners, men of influence or young unknowns; and any single individual might fulfil more than one of these roles. Arnold’s social experience was certainly not confined to the society of other intellectuals, still less of other ‘educationists’: one of the works of reference most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... independence of the Transvaal, and won election to Parliament as a Crofters’ MP for Caithness. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was a member of the Scottish aristocracy who became famous in Argentina as ‘Don Roberto’ for his exploits as a cattle rancher, returning home to become the first president of the Scottish Labour Party and, later, the honorary ...”

“... field of biology known as parabiosis, which involves experiments in blood transfusion from the young to the old. Asked about this at a New York Times event in 2018, Thiel responded: ‘I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to say. I want to publicly tell you I’m not a vampire.’Is there a guiding philosophy that connects this bewildering range 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...”

“... suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,Holders of one position, wrong for years.This has the young Auden’s typical combination of doomwatch and kicking energy. The voice of the inevitable is speaking, the voice of evolutionary force, the voice of what he would eventually and notoriously, in the last stanza of ‘Spain’, call History. So it is proper ...”

“... own incarceration within the English Tripos. Abandoning the task in despair at two in the morning, young Ted goes to bed and dreams that he is visited by a strange figure, half-man and half-fox, ‘just now stepped out of a furnace’ and in terrible agony from the burns that cover its body from head to foot. This enigmatic creature moves towards the desk and ...”