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“... they say women with bound feet had exceptionally strong thigh muscles.The brief periods young Eileen spent with her mother between her European trips are always warmly described in her essays. Yvonne would talk about England, France and the Swiss Alps, and Eileen was inspired to study at the University of London, become more famous than Lin ...”

“... Bergamasque, 1890; Images oubliées, 1894) are promising but generally conventional, while the young Ravel was cultivating a Satie-like modal delicacy (Menuet antique, 1895; Pavane pour une Infante défunte, 1899).’ Fauré, moreover, can be found – so Nectoux (backed by Françoise Gervais) suggests – exploring ‘new scales and occasionally Hindu ...”

“... were usually thought capable of integration into society. This was especially true of the young, whose mental inheritance, it was argued, could not be gauged with certainty. Psychometry is double-edged. In the hands of some, measurement is a tool for identifying the unfit; in those of others, it is the basis for a programme of special education and ...”

“... was left. The cover-up was carefully supervised by the Tory Whips office, in particular by two young MPs, David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts and Andrew Mitchell, whose father, David Mitchell, is also a Tory MP, and once chose Neil Hamilton to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The Guardian had told a bit of the story. Parliament had uncovered none of ...”

“... crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, which more or less destroyed copyright law; there were the pioneering academics ...”

“... reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as ...”

“... opens with a British Council-sponsored cultural exchange, whereby an English sculptor, Stephen Cox, is sent to work with his Indian counterparts for three months. ‘Cultural exchanges are one of the more subtle ways of imposing cultural imperialism,’ writes Tully. ‘They create the impression that we respect Indian culture, while at the same ...”

“... up on pillows, gaze a bit vacantly at a marble the sculptor has been working on, in which two young dancers – bit players from a Bacchic sarcophagus – do the high-step with a bull. The animal is benevolent, not to say furry and fey; he holds up one foreleg daintily, so that the intersection of his cloven hoof with the sculptor’s nipple is entirely ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... In the old times, long before the birth of the Irish Free State, a young woman called Brigid McLaughlin went down from Derry to work in southern Donegal. Her job was to look after two children, a girl and a boy, aged nine and seven, orphans. ‘The children were beautiful,’ we are told, ‘especially the girl. She was dark, the boy was fair ...”

“... on his own boyhood memories as well as the facts of Lincoln’s life, Howells made the story of a young man’s rise from the frontier into a mythic tale. With the money he earned from the Lincoln biography, Howells travelled to Boston, then the literary capital of the United States, a trip that marked the beginning of his own mythic rise. Knowing no one in ...”

“... grinding effort and unceasing hard work, gloomy attributes which Cyril had never needed when young and hence remained disinclined for as he grew older. Though he joined in the chorus of contempt and hatred which it was fashionable for the middle-class English literati of the time to feel for their schooldays, the reality was another matter. He knew that ...”

“... Hampton in 1966, when Bloom was still married to Rod Steiger and Roth was dating ‘a beautiful young socialite’ by the beguiling name of Anne Mudge.)Here are the humble but allusive details that breathe life into anecdote: the emerald ring (in the shape of a serpent) with which Roth attempts to mollify Bloom for having cruelly depicted her in his novel ...”

“... sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel Snow has Lewis Eliot observe usefully: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping ...”