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“... of expanding student numbers on the cheap. But by then unemployment had risen steeply, and the young had been exposed to the Thatcherite doctrine-that the main purpose of a university education was to make it easier to get a job when you left. The new policy of university expansion coincided, more or less, with the introduction of the National Curriculum ...”

“... I’ve had it packed for a week now’) as well as her unhappiness. Welles’s own mother died young (or youngish – she was 42), but she wasn’t a victim. Daughter of a prosperous Illinois coal merchant, Beatrice Welles was handsome, dynamic and indefatigably improving, reading her son Shakespeare ‘before he could speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac ...”

“... pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin ...”

“... annexe at Christchurch Priory in Dorset nonetheless represents Marston as a bearded and beruffed young man sitting with a balder companion in front of two tankards of ale. Sadly, today’s visual shorthand for ‘morally intense Jacobean playwright who took holy orders’, even in the church where he prayed for a quarter of a century, is just ‘bloke in pub ...”

“... Latin prose he also praised. And there were active Latinists elsewhere as well. In the 1930s, the young Viennese scholar Ernst Gombrich wrote charming, playful compositions in medieval Latin. Even now eager students stream to programmes like those of the Paideia Institute, where they not only read but speak, sing and rap in Latin while on summer courses in ...”

“... men stare: ‘The truth is that the way European women dress is much less servile.’ If being a young woman in postwar America was suffocating, why not try Paris? Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French tells the story of three college girls – Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis – who did. Kaplan, who wrote about her own year abroad in the ...”

“... Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he couldn’t address a word to her except through Tynan: ‘Would you ask the princess what she thinks of …’ Tynan himself wanted to postpone his daughter’s birthday party until ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... Kenneth Branagh​ ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency ...”

“... and ‘iconic’ this and ‘optics’ that, had they but known it. All the doomed poets, dying young, or youngish: Rimbaud at 37, Poe at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and ...”

“... critic-in-chief to New York’s avant-garde art scene, had a breakdown after being dumped by the young Helen Frankenthaler. He was referred to Ralph Klein, a therapist who had recently begun working under Pearce and Newton. Greenberg became so attached to Klein that when the therapist left with Pearce and Newton for the summer house they’d built in ...”

“... activity: Nureyev started it, he wrote; he had resisted. Kremke became an alcoholic and died young in mysterious circumstances. Nureyev himself was tailed everywhere he went. On a trip to Deauville he was surprised to receive a phone call from his mother, once more urging his return: ‘They never heard of Deauville.’ Even in Copenhagen he was ...”

“... the war living in Manhattan on not much, and started publishing in magazines. In 1945, with one young child and another on the way, they moved to Vermont so that Stanley could teach at Bennington and the two of them could write. They chose not to live near the campus, but settled in North Bennington instead, where they seem to have been treated with some ...”

“... called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She collected Classic Comics. The family moved to Southern California, and she grew more desperate to get away. ‘I believe … that the only difference between human beings is intelligence,’ she ...”