“... him in a certain place some years from now, to save the life of someone he has never heard of, a young man named Lonnie Ironwood. Some of us float, some of us make choices, and a very few of us, like Frank, are Summoned.’ Remarks like this appear regularly; but they don’t so much kindle interest in a developing story as indicate the author’s ...”

“... in a tragedy, that the objects I had enjoyed trying to identify – was this Prince Albert or a young Edward VII? – also represented something unknowably private and painful.Objects from the past, if they survive, lose and accrue meaning over time. Their original human associations and contexts, their given purposes and original attractions, dissolve ...”

“... Child-Who-Was-Tired’, then, is really a palimpsest, not unlike the Picasso Head of a Young Man (1906), where the gouache is laid thickly over a Japanese wood-block print, but not so thickly that one cannot see lines of the original like folds in the paper – creating a visual effect analogous to papier-mâché, at a time when Picasso’s ...”

“... by organising reunions of one kind and another. Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma, the wife of the young Karl I of Austria and IV of Hungary, who became the emperor of Austria in 1916 after the death of Franz Josef, made strenuous efforts to broker peace between Austria and the Entente powers via Princess Sarsina, a member of the Habsburg network conveniently ...”

“... to undermine any attempt by the Labour Government to maintain trade links with the Russians. The young President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, was committed to maintaining these links. His trips to Russia, and especially his plans to sell old aircraft to the Russians, were more than once sabotaged by MI5. The ...”

“... with many whom, in his day, he despised: Humbert Wolfe, for example, and Vita Sackville-West and Edward Shanks. Can it be that he belongs in such forgotten company? Is his a just neglect? Reading the life, one must conclude that if he indeed had a genuine poetic gift, he had other qualities of mind and character that worked against that gift, and that his ...”

“... a gay poet before the fact. The crux of the matter is his friendship with Joseph Drake, a handsome young doctor. They met in 1813, either in Battery Park or on a ferryboat or at the Ugly Club, a bizarre institution whose members were all beautiful men but had to pretend to appreciate one another’s ugliness. In 1819, Halleck and Drake published a sheaf of ...”

“... Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men everywhere. In a public lavatory in ...”

“... sound modern. Of Jenny’s suitor Lieutenant Karl von Pannewitz, she writes: ‘The effect of the young officer’s elegant uniform wore off as fast as the Wachau Valley champagne hangover when Jenny discovered his conversation to be dull, politics neo-conservative and sense of humour banal.’ Perhaps von Pannewitz was an early supporter of the invasion of ...”

“... the English countryside, goes to school, and meets other children – in particular, the crippled Edward Campion. He also cures his grandmother, who suffers from nervous shakes. In Wiltshire Timothy loses touch with his father, but on leaving school he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a ...”

“... to see six chickens he tended – G.L. Dickinson, E.J. Dent, Siegfried Sassoon, Forrest Reid and Edward Carpenter. Interesting, too, when they involve places, travels, holidaying. Forster had what sounds like a very long holiday, beginning in October 1901, with his mother in Italy. Five months in Germany in 1905 didn’t leave a permanent impression. But the ...”

“... or any other European central banker climbing pyramids to cut out the palpitating hearts of young men and virgins with obsidian knives, but none of them hesitates to impose levels of unemployment that year after year after year deprive millions of young people of the opportunity even to start a career. Moreover, the ...”

“... underneath: they record a social life as well as a professional one. From the wedding pictures of Edward and Mrs Simpson to stars in Hollywood hotel rooms, the impression you get is that he wasn’t so much a photographer – who after all is a functionary, a kind of servant – as a friend who happened to bring his Rolleiflex along. He seems to have been ...”

“... a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering his voice, and his role. He had decided to become a teacher. Auden taught full-time for five years, from 1930 to 1935, at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, not far from Glasgow, and at the ...”

“... The young woman​ at the blockade was worried about the banner the Oaklanders brought, she told me, because she and her co-organisers had tried to be careful about messaging. But the words FUCK OFF GOOGLE in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans ...”