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“... lover too. They fell in love while translating ancient Greek. Aldington, at 19, was too young for a ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum. Doolittle, who was 25, sat under the imposing dome, transcribing Greek materials. The two young poet-translators met daily, trying to make versions of verse from the ...”

“... and his ‘fidgety ghost’ – the phrase comes from one of his Pericles-inspired poems, ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ – still haunts Australian poetry. One pictures the poet lugging a battered second-hand typewriter from flea-pit hotels to temporary lodgings, watching through sleepless mosquito-plagued nights (‘Now/Have I found you, my ...”

“... Today, in this troubled society-in-the-making, babies are born, children grow up and go to school, young people find some way or other of making a living, eventually get married and, when their life’s work is done, they die and are buried and honoured in the manner sanctioned by custom and tradition. The rites of passage that punctuate these movements and ...”

“... Burchill’s The boy looked at Johnny (also 1978), a book of scurrilous mythologies adapted from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, are elegantly tacky and anti-intellectual exercises in mimetic form. Greil Marcus’s much-admired and equally mocked Lipstick Traces (1989), on the other hand, is a massively prolix and pretentious voyage round Dada and ...”

“... little more than turning Glamis and the family home in Hertfordshire into hospitals. She was too young for serious nursing duties, and her letters dwell on jolly card games with patients and their propensity to fall in love with her and occasionally she with them. As her teens went on the horror increased with her capacity to understand it. In September 1915 ...”

“... river called, in Masai, ‘Nairobi’, meaning ‘cold water’, and drove on to Lake Victoria. As Kenneth Cameron puts it, ‘East Africa had become safariland.’ I was disappointed not to see Cameron’s book on sale in Nairobi. East African safari is a topic designed to produce jaunty reading for expats and tourists. But, while Cameron’s treatment is ...”

“... blameless, a ‘promising’ lad; McCluskie and Reynolds were almost parodically delinquent. The young murderers were both from broken homes. Both had suffered physical abuse from stepfathers. At school they had histories of truancy and disruptive behaviour in class. They had experimented with glue-sniffing and drank heavily for their age, or any ...”

“... anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ‘Golden Journey’. Interesting ...”

“... Tibet is nowhere. It is easy to tell the issues about which MacArthur felt keenly in his youth; Kenneth Tynan writing about Look back in Anger, for example, touches a memory of angry young manhood. MacArthur writes of his parents having to leave school at 14: his was ‘the first generation to go to redbrick ...”

“... by students on first acquaintance, partly through a priggishness which will allow only the young to talk dirty. But he comes into his own in the graduate school and the Zapp-it-to-me international seminars, where priggishness takes more unnatural and exclusive forms. Yet little of this helps the poor biographer. S/he can lay out all the ‘bobs and ...”

“... benefits of the Polar industry – the biopics, the biographies, the inexplicable determination of Kenneth Branagh (of Shackleton) to out-act John Mills (of Scott of the Antarctic), the retellings of modern legends about the explorers freezing and dying and writing poetry as they did so. But Tromsø is almost empty. There seem to be hardly any tourists, though ...”

“... taken art on as a sideline. Even the rival giants of American art criticism when Fried was a young man, Harold Rosenberg and Fried’s own mentor Clement Greenberg, started out wanting to be all-round literati before becoming specialists in the fine arts; but Fried, who was one of the first wave of art critics to have a PhD in art history, seems to have ...”

“... Amritsar . . . Amritsar is in Punjab’) in order to bum a cigarette. There is the smart-alecky young subway dweller named Heather Covington, a casualty of mental illness and medication herself, who deflates Will’s earnest provocations with pointed jokes. When Will tries to explain that global warming is shaped like an upward curve, rather than a straight ...”

“... for those present at the first Parteitag in Nuremberg ‘not to be emotionally affected . . . Many young Englishmen who visited Germany in the first part of that decade were moved to support Hitler’s regime.’ It’s true, they did – and Harold Nicolson was Oswald Mosley’s campaign manager, too. However . . . Lovell also writes that ‘somehow, Mosley ...”

“... disheartened,’ Oliver Letwin, the party’s head of policy, said in answer to a question from a young woman at Kent University last October. ‘Things have changed a lot. They’ve changed beyond recognition.’ The questioner – not a Conservative, she said afterwards – was complaining that she felt the tone of the campaign pressing for more women to be ...”