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“... begins to teach himself algebra and geometry in his seventies; and the marvellous, irrepressible young H.G. himself, the refugee from the draper’s counter, with his head full of a ‘loose headlong panorama of all history, science and literature’, born just late enough to hook himself, by his own efforts, into an education. Nothing in the rest of ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... Larkin’s closeted artiness to Amis’s knockabout style. Sometimes, as when he writes of the young Amis being viewed as ‘almost charismatic’, apparent bitchiness turns out to be a side effect of an awkward way with words. Elsewhere he seems as appalled as any taste-shaping puritan by Amis’s boozing and shagging. And after a while it’s hard not to ...”

“... supplies of espresso. They might have been less familiar with the groups of casually attired young men and women, who occasionally pulled off their jackets to reveal guns resting in their holsters. ‘The Mafia as we have known it for one hundred and fifty years is dead,’ Orlando announced, restlessly drawing diagrams on the blotting paper in front of ...”

“... An inspired detail – a blob of pink under the ear – lifts the whole image. It is the work of a young but not immature artist: Bell had studied and exhibited, and following the death of her father in 1904 had lived in much greater freedom with her siblings in Gordon Square. She married Clive Bell in 1907; when she painted Sydney-Turner her first ...”

“... marriage in ‘Modern Manners’, a poem first published in 1799 and reprinted recently by Roger Lonsdale in his Oxford anthology of Eighteenth Century Women Poets, she took for granted that the most direct route to separate property was to marry for money and chuck the husband. In ‘former times’, according to a speaker named Flirtilla, ‘hearts ...”

“... her, we see him, out of focus, emerge from the dust of the bomb-blast. The shot is well framed – Roger Pratt deserves his Oscar nomination for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of ...”

“... reasons, the two were at one when it came to making bad blood. ‘Never tell lies,’ the young Connolly had adjured himself, except ‘to damage the character of a friend’. He lived down to this, and so did they all. The hero of his novel The Rock Pool recalled the boredom of college life and ‘the quiet afternoons spent running up bills in ...”

“... Careau’s new Chéri. Another reason may be the quality of some of the translations of her work: Roger Senhouse’s widely used version from 1951, as Careau points out, has phrases like ‘Oh, my sainted aunt’, not to mention ‘a Chinee’. In her introduction to Eprile’s rendition, Thurman blames a generational narcissism which blocks readers from ...”

“... beautifully. You had better try and teach her to talk now.’ She came back to England without a young man in tow, but in October 1912 met Archie Christie, then a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, at a ball at Chudleigh. In August 1914 Archie, who had transferred to the RFC, was posted to France with his squadron. He returned to England on leave in ...”

“... The connection between the Apostles and Communism, in those years, was really the reluctance of a young revolutionary generation to admit any contradiction between their own ethic and the ‘bourgeois’ values of loyalty and truth which had first formed their minds. The Apostles seemed, reassuringly, to embody and guarantee a continuity between K. Marx and ...”

“... hair, creased trousers and clean white shirts who carried slide rules and said things like ‘Roger, Capcom, we copy’. They did it on behalf of a generation which wore flared denims or kaftans and smoked joints and said things like ‘Cosmic!’ and when particularly impressed: ‘Far out!’ Think of Voyager now, out of the plane of the planets ...”

“... The Mad and the Bad, extended this sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s a surreal ...”

“... for reverie and conjecture, becoming the ‘shore of dreaming’ (‘l’orée du songe’), as Roger Caillois called his own collection of stones. Like dream stones, the myths are puzzles, and they keep inviting new thoughts. The story of Medea intersects with the myth of the voyage of the Argo; but it is the continuing electric power of her myth to ...”

“... provoked Kitchener to sack him summarily, with the observation that Gallipoli ought to be ‘a young man’s war’. All of them had ‘old Regular Army ideas’. The slightly younger Brigadier-General William Sitwell (b.1860) couldn’t even use a telephone: he repeatedly spoke into the wrong end. All of them – it’s almost superfluous to say – were ...”