“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... open debate. The GB News episode shows the flimsiness of this bit of conservative self-fashioning. Andrew Neil, the chairman of GB News, warned the companies that had paused their advertising: ‘This boycott business can play both ways … we can muster millions of supporters … Not a good idea to be on the wrong end of them.’ Boycotting businesses and ...”

“... will also deteriorate? We can hardly ever know for certain. But we can look about us. Andrew Shonfield, in the sadly truncated sequel to his excellent Modern Capitalism, does so. Observing and analysing the major economies since the war, he argues that there is no natural mechanism at work to determine the overall level of economic ...”

“... on the cover of the notorious ‘Ern Malley’ issue. Ern Malley was a poet invented by two young men who thought Modernism had destroyed the craft of verse. They compiled his poems by picking fragments at random from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Shakespeare and a dictionary of quotations. For many Australians, this hoax confirmed that Modernism was a ...”

“... a limited work, cartoonish, narrow, raucous, too often mistaking noise for vividness. On the back, Andrew O’Hagan rightly characterises its effect as ‘like the Osbournes invited the Simpsons round for a root beer, and Don DeLillo dropped by to help them write a new song for Eminem,’ without telling us why that particular party would be enjoyable or even ...”

“... a mesmerist, who claims he can help her, and seems to do so with the assistance of a medium, a young woman who turns out to be … her lost sister! The confusing difference in their appearance – Catherine’s extremely large feet – is accounted for by her tightrope-walking career. When the Baron discovers Gertie is about to inherit a large fortune he ...”

“... distracted. Frail elderly people often have a less robust systemic response to infection than the young and fit, but even so, Mr Wedderburn was flushed with a temperature of 38°C, and was breathing much too quickly. As I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope his fingers picked at the bedcovers, and his feet knocked against his cot-bars. When I took a ...”

“... Rwanda’s second biggest bilateral donor, suspended aid payments – until Kagame assured Andrew Mitchell, then the secretary of state for international development, that he had no knowledge of any such threat. Mitchell was ‘inclined to believe him’. A report by Human Rights Watch three years later documented ten cases of Rwandan exiles ...”

“... in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s misfortune leads him to wish he had children, to reassess his relationship with his parents, and to ...”

“... the corner of Howe Street and Heriot Row, where you are bound to feel the press of Stevenson’s young mind, for these are his ‘sleepy quarters’, his world of oil-lamps and dark coasts.He lived at 17 Heriot Row, five floors of grey Georgian elegance facing the Queen Street Gardens, the dell of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson would dedicate that ...”

“... as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis ...”

“... switched on the power in the 1950s. Novelists such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey and V.S. Naipaul were among the first voices from the outposts of Empire to talk back. Not for them ‘clapping his hands and stamping his feet’ in order to communicate, like Conrad’s fireman (‘and he had filed teeth, too’). This black man ...”