“... more exciting and purposeful, more serious and more gleeful, in Czechoslovakia when Smiricky was young. About a quarter of this long novel consists of reminiscences thrust in, apparently at random, to interrupt the Canada-based narrative. Smiricky’s memory is jogged by old letters from the friends of his youth, moving about the world, more urgently alive ...”

“... wonder of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of ...”

“... although by no means a foul rag-and-bone shop, is a place for dreams to start. In The Commitment young Jimmy Rabbitte decides that Ireland is ready for soul music and gets his group together. Just as there seems to be a chance with a recording company they desert him one by one. In The Snapper Sharon Rabbitte, drunk in the car park at the Soccer Club ...”

“... Wordsworth – austere, perplexed, uncompromising – seems the natural example of what ‘the young’ will not respond to. ‘A man looking at a mountain: why does it have to be so complicated, they want to complain?’ In Disgrace, the choice is also ironical, for Wordworth’s greatest poem is about being young. Its ...”

“... neither by the state, to produce well-drilled army recruits, nor by the Church, eager to baptise young souls. Embodying the spirit of mercantile private enterprise, it was constituted on joint-stock principles, headed by a governing board which combined landed and commercial wealth with a sprinkling of lawyers and doctors, several of them Masons. In ...”

“... under a tree that the illumination came to him. One might, in a different way, be reminded of Stephen Dedalus as a young man, who, after a series of rigorous and futile penances, returns to the world of sensuousness and ease, to his own delight and the relief of others – there is probably something adolescent about ...”

“... fifth starring the detective Jackson Brodie, opens with our hero making some kind of escape with a young bride. She tosses her veil and bouquet onto the back seat of Brodie’s car, and they ride off into the sunset. Brodie glances at his companion: ‘He noticed she was cupping the bowl of her belly, where she was incubating an as yet invisible baby.’ No ...”

“... Stella) can have over adults is usually presented as something sinister. One variant shows the young as the occasion of supernatural occurrences – poltergeists, ghosts and so forth. Another (seen in A High Wind in Jamaica) shows them as amoral, powerful through a kind of animal innocence, not knowing their own cruelty. An Awfully Big Adventure could be ...”

“... a holiday diary kept in childhood, figured in the Tribute to W.H. Auden organised not long ago by Stephen Spender.) In general, the facts in the book are effectively deployed, but they are sometimes insufficient and uncertain. Mr Osborne’s, of course, was not an easy task. Like quite a few artists, Auden lived off rumour, and was the cause of rumour in ...”

“... In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of Lotta Continua, who tried to save her, and, in doing so, got covered in her blood. She died, he was arrested and, a pawn in the struggle between Lotta Continua and the police, was tried for her murder ...”

“... Economic growth means that local traditions have been sapped at the same time as frustrated young job-seekers, ‘crowded into decaying and often primitive slums’, are being bombarded by ‘cassettes, compact discs and videos glorifying Islamic history’, delivered by an ‘Islamist international’ shamelessly exploiting Western technological ...”

“... any more, there’s a complete breakdown in the authority of teachers and parents. Children as young as eight, nine and ten are joining gangs, running wild – using the intifada as an excuse.’ Iyyad tells me about a man from a village near Ramallah who was strangled by ‘intifada activists’ only days after being released from an Israeli prison. ‘He ...”

“... back at least as far as the beginning of the century. In a paper published in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain ...”

“... television and I first suggested it to the BBC in 1975, but without success. Then, early in 1978, Stephen Gilbert commissioned it for a series called ‘The Other Side’, also being made from Pebble Mill, Birmingham. The immediate problem was to dramatise the relationship between Great-grandfather and Maxwell, which is merely reported in the story. It was ...”

“... of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the dowry allegedly promised with their daughter, Mary, in 1604, we know a good deal more about the Mountjoy family’s affairs than we do about those of their lodger, whose bit-part role as a go-between in the marriage ...”