“... most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great ...”

“... rebel militias, government forces and semi-autonomous units. There was room for roughly a hundred young people on the property taken over from the Government by Children Associated with War – part of a sprawling, ill-appointed juvenile reform centre at the end of a dirt track some distance from the main road. Nahim and his colleagues were stretched at the ...”

“... without ever seeing one, and was surprised when after half an hour the leopard appeared, ‘large, young, and beautifully marked. Its coat was dark golden, and covered with magnificent sable rosettes … Its head gave the impression of great solidity, compact power, and it had, from certain angles, an almost reptilian look, and I felt I wanted to stare at it ...”

“... dominant in a dormant or an indecent sort of way for many years. These were difficult cities for young men with literary ambitions; they were places in which both the present and the future seemed like a hundred years of solitude. These three cities, in which three geniuses felt trapped, isolated and dismayed, made their way slowly, inevitably into the ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...”

“... see now because they don’t work here.’ The next morning as T. gets ready for work again, his young son might tell him: ‘No Daddy – no work. Work’s closed. No. Work’s closed.’ T. earns £10.90 an hour, which brings him a salary of £22,105 a year without overtime, a figure above the UK living wage of close to £16,000 but below the median wage ...”

“... take place, he will have a position and a personality.McGurl views these as the musings of a ‘young writer conscientiously puzzling through the classically Jamesian question of point of view … and discovering for himself how the discipline of perspectival limitation might intensify the story he wants to tell’. Although he recognises that Kesey is ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a ...”

“... as heat is of flame, whiteness of snow.This last lecture was introduced by the theologian David Tracy, who talked briefly about Derrida’s influence on Christian, Jewish and Buddhist studies. During the applause, a balding, young man made his way to the stage carrying an enormous potted plant, which he presented to ...”

“... discovery concerns a school for ‘difficult’ adolescents in Pennsylvania to which the young Robert Zimmerman was sent by his parents, who seem to have believed his nonconformity indicated genuine psychological problems, for an unspecified period in 1959. The dirge-like ‘Walls of Red Wing’ (1963) describes the harsh regime of a boy’s reform ...”

“... of the ‘National Bibliographic Service Organisational Chart’; ‘Boston Spa Director General David Russon viewing new digital storage and transmission equipment’ (‘Director General’! – Gogol lives); the conveyor channels of the new ‘Mechanical Book Handling System’ (tactfully, the Electric Dutch shelves which ran amok compacting their ...”

“... to sharpen the policy of reprisals. This unit was commanded by an unusually aggressive and devious young major named Ariel Sharon. Sharon and his men blew up 45 houses and killed 69 Jordanians, the majority of them women and children. Sharon was apparently well pleased with the operation, which in some quarters earned him the title ‘the murderer of ...”

“... what you get instead are telegraphic put-downs of the man, his Oxbridge associates like C.P. Snow, David Cecil and Stuart Hampshire, and that whole way of life. Twenty or so lines of that, and then you move on to something else; a page later, Berlin is back again, though this time Wilson comments on the tremendous range of his conversation, and poor Harry ...”