“... that much of his output probably was as vulgar as his inter-war critics had claimed. Percy Young believed that the man and his music were inseparable, and presented Elgar as a ‘two-worldly character’, torn between the private poet of Worcestershire (who wrote great music), and the public poseur of London (who did not). In what remains the best and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... our stocks were low, we pushed our trolleys back to the shop to replenish them. Brenda, a pleasant young married woman with elaborately permed hair, who served behind the counter, would give us the items we asked for and make a note of the quantities. I did not dislike the work. Railway stations are places of considerable sociological interest. The subtle ...”

“... Sandinista. In 1976 he appeared as their spokesman before the Russell Tribunal. By then several young people from his community of Solentiname had joined the armed struggle: soon afterwards Somoza’s National Guard laid waste to the community. Clearly the Vatican would have watched these things happening with some concern. Now the politicisation of even ...”

“... same seems to go for Mr Campbell. The fact that it takes some hundred and forty pages to get the young FE into Parliament gives some idea of the soporific scale of this book. Of course, these were undeniably glittering years of promise and achievement: the open scholarship to Wadham; the brilliant colleagues like Simon and C.B. Fry; the presidency of the ...”

“... handling Lenau’s verse, the other his obvious dislike of the openly political writers known as Young Germany. Elsewhere in the book political engagement is taken as a virtue in itself. Here, Craig is saying – ‘admitting’ would be too strong a term – that there can be too much of a good thing, and he criticises men like Gutzkow and his circle for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”