“... The idea of using a corpse to plant false clues lodged itself in the imagination of a young naval intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming. In the first month of the war, Fleming and his chief at naval intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, compiled a list of possible deceptions they called the ‘Trout Memo’. Some of its playful ruses ...”

“... As he looks forward to his 70th birthday Sir Michael Howard can also look back over a distinguished career which began with Wellington, Christ Church and the Coldstream Guards. In 1943, as Lieutenant Howard, fresh from the University, he led his platoon in a dangerous uphill charge against a German position north of Salerno ...”

“... full five pages, quite early on in the Elements, and it does harmonise in a striking way with the young career of George Drysdale, as unearthed by Mrs Benn. The ‘case’ is ‘a young man about fifteen years of age, of active, studious and erotic disposition’, a star pupil at his school, who had been much troubled by ...”

“... Has he betrayed his office by breaking confidence and revealing the backstage manoeuvres of Michael Foot and others? Yes, but the revelations are of interest in that they indicate a secret system. Whether they are accurate is another question, of more interest to Mr Foot and his friends than it is to the rest of us. The most amusing revelation of all ...”

“... rules governing marriage licences; all those guessing games about how, when and where young William got out of the glove-making and wool-dealing business and into the theatre – and allows Shapiro to get straight to the much more interesting question, often skimped in such books, of what Shakespeare’s working life, the bit that made him ...”

“... recent reception, it’s not his plays. Apart from Steven Pimlott’s Doctor Faustus in 2004 and Michael Boyd’s condensed Tamburlaine in 2014, there have been few outstanding Marlowe revivals in the 21st century, and his plays have been put on only in small venues. The second half of Pimlott’s Doctor Faustus led its audience through the centre of ...”

“... epoch, just as they do the life of the novel’s voyeuristic, emotionally autistic narrator, Michael Owen, whose finger hovers constantly by the freeze-frame button as he drools over videos. The Thatcherite Eighties were all about emotionally retarded men excitedly glued to screens, manipulating signs to conjure fortunes into being as arbitrarily as the ...”

“... of Chekhov), garish in their ordinariness, is brilliantly realised, seemingly too old, too young, too middle-aged, too powerful, too powerless, too married, too divorced. Li does wonderful children, wonderful spinsters, wonderful widowers. Families are small, fissile, unexpectedly extended, ruptured, porous. They are vulnerable to ...”

“... as offering the entire contents of a house for sale in the front yard, then getting drunk with a young couple looking for bargains and dancing to your own records with the confused young wife (‘Why don’t you dance?’). The pick of this bunch is ‘Where is everyone?’ in Fires (an extended and much improved version ...”

“... genetic caste’, who believes that the population boom after the war has produced 76 million young Americans ‘fresh, confident, programmed for innovation’. His unreadable recent books take their place alongside the mass of 19th-century American Lamarckist literature, equally greedy, equally implausible. (We are all due to go and live in outer ...”

“... were a liberal) easily romanticised. March’s thoughts, in his memoir, about the sensibility of young poets, make clear how much romanticising was going on beneath those hard-boiled idioms: Young poets are extremely sensitive, and unfortunately for them, they cannot turn this sensitivity on and off like a bathroom ...”

“... or just dead. It’s hard to distinguish between the damage done to the old Frankenstein by Young Frankenstein, to say nothing of The Munsters, and the damage done by time and change on their own. Certainly when Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein’s crippled assistant Fritz, scuttles off down a hill, doubled over his very short walking-stick, it’s hard not ...”

“... no Epsom nor Ascot!’ Of course James was speaking of America in the 1830s, the world the young Hawthorne looked out on, and he was exaggerating anyway. He knew America had changed, was changing as he wrote, and we can see that several of these apparent deficiencies have happily and not so happily been met. The interesting thing about the list is its ...”

“... pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. ‘He did well here, and died ...”

“... gravity of their circumstances. When the fighting restarted in June and panic hit the town, one young man in Monrovia told me: ‘It won’t be an easy disaster for us.’ The following day, President Taylor complained in a radio address that Lurd had ‘come once again to disturb the peace and quiet of the country’. People speak about the US with more ...”