“... Theoria, his 15th book, and was critic for the Sunday Telegraph. For the death of a relatively young art critic there was a surprising amount of obituary and tribute: ‘surprising’ because the British press has little interest in art and art criticism – coverage offered in the mainstream press is usually in the hands of one of the arts editor’s ...”

“... reckon him a philistine, and who neither like nor admire the books; and he clearly isn’t very young people’s cup of tea at all. This still leaves Kenner’s position unconsidered. I began by mentioning the fact that Difficulties with girls happened to bring back suddenly an actual conversation. What struck me was the degree to which the novel was left ...”

“... frequently seems ripe for the travel pages of Vogue. Carcanet has published a series of books by young poets gravitating towards the idea of travel. Of those under review, Grevel Lindop’s Tourists is the most transparently accomplished. Lucid of contour, with a syntax almost too elegiacally attuned to form, his work displays, even when not concerned with ...”

“... with which to end an introduction to the English comic writers. But not everybody likes Rabelais. Young Calvin did. The later Calvin did not. Nor did the Council of Trent – where the French were a tiny minority. Rabelais’s Christian comedy was too much for Pius IV. His Index Tridentinus (1564) casts Rabelais among the ‘forbidden authors of the first ...”

“... A more graphic reply is ruled out by the fact that both the editor and the assistant editor are young women, new to the job but learning fast. In the editorial half-world of the property-market giveaway glossies and Naim Attallah’s corps de ballet, lively copy is pursued in all innocence by fashionable female honourables whose idea of a rigorous literary ...”

“... than ushering in a new one’, and this view is echoed by some other remarks quoted in the book. Young poets at poetry readings say that almost every other poet is ‘their contemporary’, but not Lowell. Like Colonel Shaw of For the Union Dead he is ‘out of bounds’ now, left behind like a museum exhibit, a period photograph, while Abstract ...”

“... attempts at explanation; I had to assume that which I had balked at for such a long time, that the young gentlemen out there were not accessible to me. They were not my kind. They were the messengers of the other. But perhaps the phenomenon of the Stasi – in which I wish to include the popular fascination with the phenomenon of the Stasi, since, in the form ...”

“... trials in the 1790s alone. Everyone was rioting: miners, tanners, weavers, debtors in their jails, young gents at Eton and Winchester. The comfortable classes, from the Iron Duke downwards, fretted that the country was staggering towards revolution.And out of the taverns where the plots were hatched poured the most extraordinary cast of desperadoes and ...”

“... in 1998, of an earlier form of electronic money, eCash, developed by the computer scientist David Chaum. When Chaum’s firm, which ran the system in a centralised fashion, went bankrupt, it took eCash down with it. With bitcoin, there is no central computer, and therefore no single point of failure, but there isn’t a central record ...”

“... a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she accepted the ceremonial title of ‘Miss Army Recruiter’. A budding Method-trained actress, the daughter of an American icon, she fell in love with Roger Vadim, the Nouvelle ...”

“... guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of ...”

“... of place outside the Ritz – it was quietly innovative. One of the team’s driving forces was a young Englishwoman, Blythe Masters; another, Terri Duhon, makes no secret of her upbringing in a trailer in Louisiana; central to its technical work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was ...”

“... some sense intrusive in wishing that they did.The marriage fell apart in the summer of 1962 when David Wevill, a Canadian poet whose work Hughes admired, and his wife, Assia, visited Court Green, the house in Devon where Hughes, Plath and their two young children were living. The Wevills stayed over the weekend of 18 to 20 ...”

“... were in contact with the Emergency Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including Chagall, Ernst and Arendt. Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly impossible, but she ...”

“... become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery Lane. The Grove sweeps down into Notting Dale, and passes several of the large communal gardens that are a feature of the Ladbroke Estate, and which appear in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. People tell me ...”