“... second car thought to have been involved in the crime. Nicola Sacco, 29 and happily married with a young son, was a trusted employee in another shoe factory; Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 31 and single, peddled fish in the streets. They had eked out a living in the United States for just over a decade, and still spoke relatively little English. (In jail, their English ...”

“... and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard’s originator emerges in David Gilmour’s entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject’s own fastidiousness? In the brief, lyrical memoir Lampedusa wrote in 1955, he invoked with unequivocal passion the ...”

“... Dolly Varden, in Barnaby Rudge, a locksmith’s daughter and the most overtly sexual of his young heroines, is ogled as relentlessly by the novel’s narrator as she is by a squad of suitors of her own age and class whom we are clearly meant to regard as altogether less eligible than him. During the ‘No Popery!’ riots of June 1780, two of the ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... the Tories’ fate? Or was it the announcement soon afterwards by the once rational Sir George Young, Secretary of State for Transport, that the answer to the mounting horrors of the London Underground is to flog it off to the likes of Stagecoach plc? Sir George timed his announcement to fit in sweetly with the news that Stagecoach, having just won the ...”

“... and poisonous everywhere from the farmstead to the gleaming suburb. And, bitterest of ironies, young men must die in defence of all this. Several stories deal with the war against South Africa’s neighbours. The young paratrooper in Etienne Van Heerden’s ‘My Cuban’ broods: ‘Oh how we float, the flower of the ...”

“... The young Wordsworth, standing on Westminster Bridge, felt the wonder of the city. He did not try to comprehend it as a scientific phenomenon, for it was not his job to provide a systematic explanation of the integrated operation of its ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples. And yet there is a sense of marvel that such an organism, with its mighty heart, could come into being and function in its baffling complexity, heaving with activity as so many people went about their separate occasions by day, and lying in a deep calm by night ...”

“... of female society), those who play professional football do not: they are still overwhelmingly young workingclass men. Which brings us to Arsenal. To the extent that any individual club historically stands for this culture (for better and worse) it is Arsenal: no other club has had such continuous membership of whatever has been at the time the senior ...”

“... own art.In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor, the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a proper woman, not one of these neurotics’. She is the girlfriend who replaced me.People don’t become ...”

“... shown alongside his prints are mostly posthumous catalogues. Around the end of 1980, Hujar met a young artist, David Wojnarowicz; they were briefly lovers and continued to collaborate on various projects. Hujar photographed Wojnarowicz’s mural paintings at New York’s disused piers, where gay men had found erotic ...”

“... contest within the BBC had been between the guardians of the Reithian heritage and provocative young producers in drama and satire who sought to turn the BBC into a site of political and cultural opposition. During most of that time, there was a fragile armistice – even sometimes an alliance – between satirists, drama producers and documentary makers ...”

“... David Mitchell’s new novel is set on and around an artificial island called Dejima, constructed in the bay of Nagasaki to house representatives of the Vereenigde Oest-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), the sole official conduit for European trade with Japan during almost all of the rule of the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603-1867 ...”

“... it shared Carthage’s fate, the better. ‘National hatred must sound forth,’ he trumpeted. ‘Young republicans should suck a hatred of the name Englishman with their mother’s milk.’ The English were ‘a populace foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear.’ It seems that he meant this last sentence all too literally, for he ...”

“... youth. The pen was in his hand and the memory was too intense to hold back another minute. Young Sam had been playing hooky from school. Anticipating a whipping at home he slipped through the window of his father’s law office and settled himself for the night. ‘As I lay on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness,’ Twain ...”

“... of small, brilliantly-coloured transparencies. But the detail is enthralling. It’s 1967: a young family bound for the Outer Hebrides, we drive across the moor at Culloden, skirting the plain where long low humps in the coarse grass and stunted heather cover the skeletons of the 1100 Highlanders killed in that April hour of 1746, each clan with its name ...”