“... Ageing can be avoided, but only at the unacceptable cost of dying young. Otherwise, it is inescapable, and it starts younger than we think. If ageing is defined as the sum of those intrinsic processes in the organism that lead to increased probability of death from natural causes, it begins in our early teens and is continuous thereafter ...”

“... There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate ...”

“... Angelo Morbelli’s In the Rice Fields is a good example of what came of them. A row of young women, skirts hitched up, stand knee-deep in a paddy field. Clothes, skin, the leaves of rice, water and sky, are done in tiny strokes so glossy that the paint glitters – you might think specks of glass had been added to it. Luminosity is indeed ...”

“... the books he wrote about. And when he didn’t like them he enjoyed that too. In 1996 he reviewed Andrew Neil’s memoir of his life and times as ‘a front-line journalist’ (‘front-line journalists usually have a high opinion of themselves but Neil’s self-regard is loud, unique, indestructible’): Add to these anecdotes and quotations Neil’s ...”

“... they stare out at you, some on single monitors, others enlarged, or split-screen, with three young men sitting at a generous console. In his office, McAlister has the same control facilities as they do. ‘Not because I want to sit here in a black polo-neck stroking my cat,’ he said, ‘but because it allows me to do more.’There are 91 street cameras ...”

“... from Henri Lefebvre’s speculations on social space and the early materialist writings of the young Marx, which Lefebvre had translated into French. They emerge, therefore, directly out of a preoccupation with reintegrating an aesthetic system into daily life. ‘From now on,’ the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem wrote in 1967, ‘the analysts are in the ...”

“... crowd of small boys had gathered around the tape. ‘Give’s a fag,’ said one. ‘You’re too young,’ says I. ‘Am I fuck. I’ve smoked for ages.’ ‘Age are you?’ ‘Nine,’ he says, pulling a ten-pack from his pocket, and lighting one up behind a tiny cupped hand. ‘Same age as Daniel,’ I said. ‘He smoked as well. He used to go out with my ...”

“... is painstaking in showing the stew of politics and friendship and creativity that surrounded the young Bellow, and because the friends were bookish and often writers – Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Kaplan, Oscar Tarcov, then Harold Rosenberg, David Bazelon, Herb McClosky, and then the entire New York intellectual clique, Kazin, Howe, Trilling – Leader is able ...”

“... latter. This won’t wash. An example is the ‘settlement movement’, which from the 1880s set young university graduates to work in the London slums in an attempt to do something practical about poverty and reduce class antagonism. Hunt says that by the later 1880s, Toynbee Hall, most famous of these ‘colonial’ settlements, ‘no longer seemed ...”

“... As I drove I could feel her scrutinising me suspiciously: ‘I hope you’re not on drugs, young man.’ I asked her again where she lived. She directed me, with great confidence, into a cul-de-sac, only to declare that this, obviously, wasn’t where she lived. We tried again, with the same result. Impatiently and desperately, I told her I couldn’t ...”

“... to the King, carelessly leaves a purse of gold in a cab and has to be reminded that the strange young man who speaks to him is his son. Dumas père gave him a walk-on part in the final episode of his Musketeer saga and turned him into a twittering buffoon. For Barbey d’Aurevilley, he was ‘an amoral moralist, a casual poet of exasperating perfection, as ...”

“... he to proselytise. One report has it that he ripped out and sent seven pages of the book to his young sister, Jennifer, just before the bombing. What she told Jennings was that her brother gave her the whole novel to read ‘several years ago’. This is evidently the family line: ‘I know he’s read it, I’ve read it. A lot of people say it’s a racist ...”

“... volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to reading 21 books ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... supporters: Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, James Fox and Bella Freud, and the five or so young people I associated with WikiLeaks. We were led up to seats in the gallery they’d saved for friends. As soon as I sat down and looked down at the court I saw Esther Addley of the Guardian. She saw me, smiled, and I smiled back and she lifted her ...”