“... In a short story called ‘The Value of Money’ (1964), we are told that the childhood of Edward Gellert ‘was separated sharply from his adolescence by his mother’s death, which occurred when he was ten.’ In Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf (1945), the teenager Lymie Peters has already lost his mother. The narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow ...”

“... drinking, and periodically subject to extreme physical abuse, the Marlowe of the novels, unlike Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity, is trapped in the dark underside of American life and never acquires the insurance man’s protective armour, his forceful, single-minded menace. But whereas in Woman in the Window Lang directed ...”

“... men who struggled most with life in the dolls’ house. Ridley’s biography of George’s father, Edward VII, showed how as prince of Wales he sank into an analgesic round of gargantuan meals, card playing, shooting and ponderous intercourse with society ladies. Unwilling to become the signing automaton of constitutional theory after his accession, ...”

“... manners. In Aleph’s duetting with Harvey we are to hear a song of foolish innocence, sung by two young people about to trip over the threshold of life, not an idiom resonant with social and educational privilege. The ‘king-size sheet from Liberty’s sale’ which serves as the best table-cloth at Clifton is just a prop on a stage set. Far from wishing to ...”

“... bears little resemblance to the archetypal Irish revolutionary as sketched by Tom Garvin: a young man from the country, aspiring and impatient, frustrated of opportunities, working at a level below that befitting his education. His Mayo background, as the son of a solicitor’s clerk in Castlebar, remained hugely important to him, however, and when the ...”

“... suggest that ‘the family might be in some such moment of vital agitation as that attending the Young Girl’s engagement, or pending engagement’, his imagination seems to have been chiefly engaged by the idea of rounding up a dozen leading writers, each of whom would treat a common subject ‘in character’. ‘There could be fun enough,’ he had ...”

“... without the Haram al-Sharif and without a real state, or even the prospect of viable statehood. Young Palestinians have had enough and, despite Arafat’s feeble efforts to control them, have taken to the streets to throw stones and fire slingshots at Israeli Merkavas and Cobras.What Israel has depended on in the past, the ignorance, complicity or laziness ...”

“... US, travelled to Vienna and returned as Dr Freud’s Wunderkind. Amazing social success for one so young. Strong influence on such older associates as Education, Government, Child-Rearing and the Arts, and a few raffish friends like Advertising and Criminology.   Complaint: Speaks of overwork, loss of confidence and inability to get provable results. Hears ...”

“... me as deeper, more naive things, in their worked-up despondency, than almost all the spellbound young men and dream-wrapped young ladies, trying, sculpturally or pictorially, for much the same wine-and-roses effect. The poems, in a word, were more beautiful. (And this immediate judgment of taste on my part linked up, as I ...”

“... they looked like. She made things in plasticine – heads, flowers – and drew and painted from a young age. When she was 16 she enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied illustration and textile design and took life drawing classes with Bernard Meninsky, who was known for his heavy black charcoal lines (Cooke preferred a 3H ...”

“... of Moldavia, its capital, Iaşi, belonged to an Orient that would be familiar to readers of Edward Said. A ‘degraded’ populace was mesmerised by ‘the constant expectation of the arrival of some fatal order’: the gorgeous costumes of the women rendered ‘their indolent languor peculiarly voluptuous’; doubly supine, the ladies at court were ...”

“... Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it.) It’s a different matter for young Tom’s Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath’. George MacDonald Fraser’s series of novels about him – known collectively as The Flashman Papers, the first of which appeared in 1969 – are, I would ...”

“... them as a compliment to the Brighton of little antique shops: a town that loves things. The big Edward Lear landscape may not be as brisk and decisive as his watercolour sketches, but it’s only fair to take his own preferences seriously once in a while. Pictures – certainly the pictures here – were, on the whole, made for middle-class ...”

“... on the changes I have seen. The most considerable change has only just occurred to me. When I was young we all believed in Progress and so did a couple of generations before us. We followed the guidance of Dr Coué and chanted in unison: ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’ Progress was a watertight guarantee that, despite temporary ...”

“... you could see what they were about. Nice views, appealing animals, snow scenes, the occasional young woman in varying quantities of folksy clothes: you knew where you were with pictures. ‘Captive Andromeda’ by Arthur Hill (1876). Confusingly, though, the one public building in Bournemouth you might visit in order to see what definitely seemed to ...”