“... all that clever-clever experimental Nabokovian crap he thought of his son as writing. And when young the poncey smartarse was a leftie (by his father’s standards, anyway), and would go on about it. But one is still left envying aspects of Martin’s relation with his father, Kingsley buying his early post-pubescent sons a gross of condoms or doing his ...”

“... authored by distinguished-looking foreign gentlemen – Nabokov, Calvino – rather than a scruffy young lady in a combat jacket with a curly Jimi Hendrix crop. But the world caught up with her in the 1970s with the spread of women’s liberation and the founding in Britain of the feminist Virago Press. Carter was one of the first authors Virago recruited to ...”

“... was thrilling, she told Juliano in the documentary he made about her, Arna’s Children, to be a young woman ‘driving people from place to place, and nobody could stop you’. She would remain a Palmachnik – tough-talking, sometimes arrogant, always brutally direct – and she passed the style on to Juliano. The keffiyeh she wore in Jenin, which ...”

“... of defeat.But Lucas does hear something just before he dies. Across the empty water of the bay a young boy and his father are fishing from a boat anchored near the shore. The young boy is trailing a line from the stern of the small boat and their voices carry clearly across the surface of the waters. As Lucas dies, there ...”

“... system safer, the answer again is that we don’t really know. As the financial historian David Marsh observed, the only way you can properly test a firewall is by having a fire. I think the ring-fence is an opportunity missed. That goes for a lot of the small complicated rules designed to make banks and the financial system safer. Bankers complain ...”

“... the novelist, Joan Acocella speaks with some reverence of Cath-er’s ‘Duse revelation’: the young writer’s precocious verdict, having seen both actresses perform onstage in the 1890s, that Duse was the superior artist because of the classical restraint she invariably brought to her roles. Bernhardt ‘expressed’ tragic emotion, Cather wrote in a ...”

“... fired.) ‘In my whole life,’ he confided to Einstein, ‘I have never felt so Jewish as now.’ Young Fritz, too, came to feel for the first time that he was not ‘Aryan’, a word that had had little resonance before. He knew nothing of his Jewish origins until his father’s severe lecture after he directed an anti-semitic remark at his sister. Then the ...”

“... was also not one of much scientific interest except to one or two mavericks. One of them was a young American physicist called James Hansen, whose 1967 PhD thesis studied Venus and came to the conclusion that it was the greenhouse effect which made the planet so warm – 400ºC on the surface, hot enough to melt lead. A probe later the same year showed ...”

“... and could watch the ships going up and down. When I was 12 or 13 they were saying: “What’s young Billy going to do when he leaves school?” He wasn’t going to be a plumber. He was going to sea, wasn’t he?’It wasn’t an easy way to make a living. Crews worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off on the journey to and from the Icelandic fishing ...”

“... I look in the index of books on either sensibility or sentiment, and if there is no reference to David Hartley I close the volume. G.J. Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief reference to Locke must be ...”

“... of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made ...”

“... Webb, breasting 35, was happy to have such a vigorous collaborator, six years his junior – two young men with a common commitment to making a success of the School for all their differences in political outlook. The fact is that the two had a good deal in common, through their basically anti-Glad stonian outlook, at a time when liberal economists – the ...”

“... like Cary Grant. ‘Cary Grant’, after all, was an invention, an idealised hero made out of young Archie Leach from Bristol, his influences and his desires. ‘I guess,’ Grant later admitted, to ‘a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became ...”

“... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...”

“... Joan Miller and Tyler Kent’ illustrates the point. Joan Miller was a redoubtable young woman who found her way into the transport section of MI5 in September 1939, and attracted Knight’s attention almost at once. It wasn’t long before she was transferred to the more glamorous ‘B’ division. Here I must declare an interest. In 1982, I ...”