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“... kids who, having grown up with reality TV, imagine reality as a sort of performance anyhow – the young drivers Vanderbilt writes about are full of their status as car-drivers. The DriveCam gives us glimpses of something that had never been seen on film, ‘the inner life of the driver’. And yet paying attention to oneself is not the same as paying ...”

“... instead of consoling the patients, which is what she’s meant to do. I wish that Dr Isaacs, the young doctor I find very attractive, had come instead of her. I’m sure he would have been more sympathetic. Monday afternoon. Two other women have arrived for operations, a Spanish woman called Carmen and Rosemary, a vegan from Ascot. Rosemary has a strange ...”

“... I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me ...”

“... the army. That was a great deal too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law … As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was ...”

“... neoliberal leadership that had ruled the country for the last three decades. What appealed to the young and to the many who had left the party in disgust during the Blair/Brown years – what appealed to the people who turned the campaign into a genuine social movement – was precisely what alienated the political and media cliques. Corbyn’s campaign ...”

“... There are maps both in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, which deals with bohemians in general, and in Andrew Barrow’s, which is a study of two in particular, but the street plans of Soho, Paris or Munich are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly ...”

“... relatively low, as it usually is with polio: the damage is reckoned in the spoiled bodies of the young rather than in mass graves. Nearly 550 patients, most of them children, were brought into hospital presenting fever and paralysis within less than four months. Behind that total is the fact that polio, one of the most infectious illnesses known to ...”

“... and loathing, which is chiefly a warped form of embarrassment about one’s former admiration. Andrew Biswell’s new biography, which generously allows Burgess’s friends and enemies to speak in their own voices, flushes out the worst aspects of Lewis. It presents Burgess’s life with a sobriety and care that are at once admirable and slightly ...”

“... of Christ had reconciled herself to her disability, and books by ‘God’s Smuggler’, Brother Andrew. I went so far as to write to Brother Andrew, asking how I too might do God’s will and smuggle Bibles into heathen lands. He wrote back, suggesting I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s ...”

“... of farming out the office to substitutes at a profit. London was no longer infested by unbeneficed young preachers living on their grubby wits. The Morning Post had ceased to be edited by a gang of ‘parsonical banditti’ ever ready to fight duels in Hyde Park. Hunting parsons, shooting parsons and wrestling parsons were becoming figures of the past. To be ...”

“... the celestial sphere. Here is the partly divine Gilgamesh, hero of the earliest poem extant, in Andrew George’s translation: Eleven cubits was his height, Four cubits his chest, from nipple to nipple. A triple cubit his feet and a rod his stride, A triple cubit the beard of his cheek. When Polyphemus rails against Odysseus from the clifftop, Homer asks us ...”

“... feelings spread varies from species to species. A wolf or a wild dog suckles her pack-mate’s young, and, it is said, even human wolf-children. A sheep, on the other hand, defends herself against rearing others. Lambs run through the whole herd, and could easily steal milk if allowed to. But a ewe learns her own new-born’s smell as she licks off the ...”

“... Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities. His 1970 living-room is ...”

“... had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent self-pity as the portal to true empathy with others.But he was alert to his lack of parents. Substitutes and metaphors ...”

“... It takes epic disasters to rouse their language to levels above the workmanlike. I except Andrew Greig, the Scottish poet who has gone on two Himalayan expeditions to write about them. If our touchstone (among living writers) is W.H. Murray, with his power of opening up a quiet, unremarkable hour in the mountains into layers and vistas of visionary ...”