“... allowed in old age to use the glasses which had been denied him earlier as ‘unsuitable for a young man’; and in Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ...”

“... that I had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did ...”

“... Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did little, however, to appease his critics. One journalist thought that the six runners should attempt a form of ...”

“... a stick. That photo also suggests, obscurely, a certain mismatch between the intense, challenging young man who confronts the camera with a stare falling somewhere between steely and sultry, and the professional role he was coming to occupy. For, to all intents and purposes, he was an orthodox product of Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’ in its ...”

“... friends, including the economist Piero Sraffa (who had known Henderson’s hero, Gramsci) and the young socialist historian E.P. Thompson, who shared his mistrust of the merely literary ‘culture boys’. He returned to Scotland, this time permanently, in the summer of 1946. Rebuffed by his father’s Glaswegian family, he embarked on a teacher training ...”

“... which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings him a bowl of water so he can dip them in to test. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience ...”

“... Otis Ferguson, a reviewer who never puffed, thought Stewart in The Shop around the Corner ‘a young American with as broad and unaffected a base in a country’s experience as Huck Finn’. It has been the way of critics, and the habit on the whole of audiences, too, to take Stewart as something the native climate effortlessly produced. But Stewart for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of piety otherwise displayed. (Frame Analysis) Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone: Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in their legislative offices ... What ...”

“... 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 ...”