“... Library was a backstage pass to where the real action was in all its sordid glamour, offering the young and privileged a vantage point in the wings, if not the royal box. There were traces too of sexual dissidence as a sort of gnosis, offering access to esoteric truths. A forbidden identity could be claimed, not in the spirit of political critique but as an ...”

“... resonance with the themes of Timelines. The most immediate connection is with Eric Ravilious’s A Young Airman (1933), an exquisite wood engraving of the cruciform shadow cast by a biplane. But the selection also includes works with a political point to make: Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco II (1937), an etching originally intended for reproduction on ...”

“... of the Academy not to concede that it was swept away last summer when theatres were packed with young people in pink talking back to the fun as if at a karaoke event. In truth, that ghost of old cinema as a mass medium was a rite of nostalgia without much promise of a trend. But fondness for that ghost has persuaded many that Barbie has been ...”

“... are special ones, and it would seem on the face of it that the same limitations must apply. For David Lodge is writing about Catholics as Catholics, about their particular dilemmas, their casuistical puzzles, the blind alleys that modern Catholic prescriptions lead them into, about their various ways out, and finally about the astonishingly sudden and ...”

“... Nancy Mitford’s first novel, Highland Fling, is about a young British gentlewoman in the late 1920s, wriggling uneasily but divertingly in the generation gap of her time and class. Her parents’ generation seems to be stuck in the mud of the grouse moors: tough as old boots, the elders blaze away, pausing to reminisce about World War One and the filthy Hun ...”

“... laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female ...”

“... it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and other papers, so ran the Foreword by its ‘editor’ Richard Pennington, occupy a large red box in the McGill University Library, of which Pennington was the chief librarian, and the diary ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can be twisted into the shape of ...”

“... they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked on his own biography of the sculptor William ...”

“... candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been convincingly reified as an export article, the marketing managers can begin to dream of an acceptable Return On Capital Invested, even if the music itself still ...”

“... social and cultural changes’. Interest in pop music and football is held to be inflated (‘young people spent more time in their bedrooms or at church youth clubs than they did at rock festivals or on the football terraces’), but is also cited as mass popular entertainment to trump the bohemian counterculture. Keen to challenge stereotypical views of ...”

“... security, on the basis of age, gender and ethnic background – the likeliest terrorists are young males of Middle Eastern origin. But it does not follow that young males of Middle Eastern origin should be singled out as a general rule for special attention from security officers. This is because individual security ...”

“... streak. He looks patient yet tough, as durable as a former athlete. But he had days in 1967 as a young Marine near the DMZ in Vietnam – the demilitarised zone, aka the ‘dead Marine zone’ – that he can’t talk about:You go over there with one mindset and then you adapt. You adapt to the atrocities of war. You adapt to killing and dying, whatever ...”

“... got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At ...”

“... James was a puny child, distinguished by neither athletic nor academic prowess. His brother David was his mother’s favourite. Tall, handsome, destined for university and eventually the ministry, he was killed in a skating accident shortly before his 14th birthday. He was not the only child that Margaret had lost. But this time she was ...”