“... are children. The older we get, the less flexible our intelligence becomes. When we are very young, we are much more likely to be open to new ways of thinking and to countenance unlikely hypotheses. That doesn’t make children any good at getting things done, especially if it involves a lot of planning. Frankly, kids are terrible at concerted ...”

“... David Wilkie, 20 years old, a sober, modest son of the manse, came to London from Edinburgh in 1805. He brought with him a couple of pictures, a sound training and great diligence. In 1806 he exhibited The Village Politicians at the Academy to great acclaim. Scotland had produced a Dutch talent – a Teniers or an Ostade ...”

“... its essence. ‘Sketch of the Past’ dwells on a moment of utter captivation experienced by the young Woolf as she took in the sweep of gardens stretching down the slope below Talland House, the family’s holiday home in St Ives. ‘The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one ...”

“... a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been launched in Wheeling, West Virginia only four years earlier, in the speech where the senator claimed to have the ...”

“... partying which has informed ‘standard accounts’ of the so-called Jazz Age, crammed with bright young things enjoying a hop and a skip before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His suggestion is that the times were more political: less cocaine, more coal-face; less hangover, more pit-closure. The defining moment, he argues, was not the Crash, but the General ...”

“... 44 by a self-destructive death. It showed what confusion there was in the early development of a young artist of limited talent and uncertain direction. It demonstrated how he found within himself an intuition of the course he had to take, an uncharted course for which he was uniquely suited. It proved that by the time he was in his mid-thirties he had ...”

“... findings on the Nazi leadership, what we see are aging men running a party increasingly made up of young women. The ranks of party functionaries, growing old with the regime, contained many misfits. Their arbitrariness and frequent incompetence were built into the decision-making structure of the Third Reich. But Kater also shows the powerful bureaucratic and ...”

“... is falling down as Language of Fiction (1966). That, then, was my basic concept of the novel: a young, married, impoverished Catholic research student, racked by anxiety about his wife’s putative fourth pregnancy, would be propelled through a series of picaresque adventures centring on the British Museum Reading Room, each episode echoing, through ...”

“... me for me,’ I just identified with it so much. It was what I felt when I came to Hollywood as a young girl. You know, they want to make you over completely. They do your hair and make-up and it was always like I was fighting to show some of my real self. So I related to the resentment of being made over and the need for approval and the desire to be ...”

“... in love. What matters is that in the fifteen years since he died she has managed to wean her ‘young soul’ from its yearning after his. Or not quite. The poem concludes with Rosina’s admission that she still harbours a taste for ‘memory’s rapturous pain’, even though she knows that any further indulgence in it would exclude her for ever from the ...”

“... miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David Cecil, of which a portion appeared as preface to an earlier selection. Desmond MacCarthy was probably the best-known London literary journalist of his time, and it is clearly the view of publisher and editor that his influence can be extended into our ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... come climactically together because of something special they sense in each other – the young man in Birdsong calls it his lover’s ‘pulse’ – and then move apart because of circumstance and society’s restrictiveness; by the end, the woman has learned something about life and personal liberation. They are also high-class ...”

“... with a bit of a breeze but a clear sky, when I boarded a small shabby Boston Whaler belonging to David Wingate. We were going to Nonsuch Island, the home of the cahow, an oceanic bird that was believed extinct for more than 300 years. Invisible most of the time and, like most Bermudians, off at sea as often as possible, it is unique to Bermuda and now one of ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”