“... but never crosses the boundary’. Stephen Haggard’s Nya is the story of the love between a young man and a 13-year-old girl. Readers of Lolita will imagine such a book as a hotbed of sexual and linguistic transgression. But in Nya nothing untoward happens. Sexual innocence is not even tempted into experience; the girl first plays among street-boys but ...”

“... as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis ...”

“... coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the ...”

“... a return to the historic quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could ...”

“... requirements and raises pay, Osama’s guarantee of hardship, hunger and probable death has young Muslims jumping the jihad queue. By body count – which proved an unsure indicator in Vietnam – the US is winning. It has killed and incarcerated more Muslims than Osama has Westerners. But Osama has the upper hand. The American invasion and occupation ...”

“... who could negotiate what he called (borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippmann, the energetic young editor of the New Republic) a ‘peace without victory’. Later, he would propose a much more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace – replacing militarist regimes with democracies – which liberal intellectuals as well as conservative ...”

“... as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in ...”

“... Angola. One of them was Mozambique. In 1963, Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frelimo, approached Robert Kennedy in the hope of securing funding. Kennedy was impressed with Mondlane and offered him $60,000 through the Ford Foundation, which, as Williams points out, was closely linked to the CIA. This didn’t sit well with the Soviets, who were supporting ...”

“... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally ...”

“... supposed to love or even like Chagall.’ The so-called New York intellectuals, most of them young enough to have been Chagall’s sons, were suitably ambivalent. Irving Howe dismissed Chagall’s ‘softened and sweetened’ version of the shtetl. Harold Rosenberg was more tolerant in his condescension: ‘The distinction of Chagall’s ghetto ...”

“... theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal orthodoxy. The dead man, a member of the ...”

“... Art in New York put on a solo exhibition of his work, and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will ...”

“... in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theatre and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect.’ German armed forces personnel trained around 56,000 Nationalist troops, and at any one time there were around 10,000 Germans engaged in the war in some capacity on the ground; the total ...”

“... statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling all picked up the idea, so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented: ‘A “search for the Mother” had become a major component of the “unconscious nostalgias of the Western intellectual”.’ The only such ...”

“... Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air. The dashing new king’s arrival in London by aeroplane was widely reported and seen as a refreshing sign of modernity: here was a prince who was both a man of the people – of the desperate poverty he saw in Wales he said ...”