“... Story of a Life, which, given that it’s an account of the first thirty years of the life of a young male, seems worthy of note. Perhaps it is this virginal or puritanical aspect of Paustovsky that is communism’s gift. In the absence of the anti-bourgeois construct ‘free love’ – the transaction uncomplicated as ‘a glass of water’ (Alexandra ...”

“... were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend Valerie Storie and then shooting her, leaving her for dead before driving off in the couple’s car. Among the guests at the wake were Jean Justice, who told me he was a (rather elderly) law ...”

“... of a black man at the hands of the police, and the burning and looting of an Italian restaurant by young blacks, Malcolm X could have been a musical with death on its mind, or with death waiting for it, and some early intercutting of the Boston scenes with scenes of violence from Malcolm’s childhood suggests something like this, notably a cut from a game of ...”

“... death, and is set in the present, when Cuba and Nicaragua fill the dreams of the European young. Some of the European young: perhaps Böll was not entirely up-to-date with the fading popularity of radical dreams. But the time here really stretches back to 1945. It is a whole post-war Germany that is being ...”

“... arrest, although the emergency services arrive swiftly and do what they can. At the hospital a young doctor looks nervous at the prospect of telling Didion the final news. A social worker says: ‘It’s OK. She’s a pretty cool customer.’ Quintana makes a fragile recovery and is able to attend her father’s funeral in New York on 23 March 2004. Two ...”

“... wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. ‘After all,’ said Isherwood, ‘Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.’ The young man was not impressed. ‘But Hitler killed six million Jews,’ he said sternly. ‘What are ...”

“... to whom the horses were to be sold, and who owns much of the land and a lot of action in Cuba; his young American mistress Amelia Brown, a woman all set to get into more and more trouble; Victor Fuentes, Boudreaux’s agent, a man who looks like (and is) a rebel sympathiser biding his time; the local police chief and his spy; an American sailor who was blown ...”

“... eyesight, though her hand was still steady, without any trembling.It was far from usual for young men like Van Dyck to express admiration for blind, elderly women. Yet the meeting made a deep impression on him. Not only is this the longest description of a person or a painting to be found in the sketchbook he kept during his Italian years, it is also ...”

“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... literature of our times. I was living in a civilisation which despised the old and worshipped the young. But somehow I never took these dire threats seriously. I belong to an old tribe and I knew that literature thrives best on ancient faith, timeless hopes, and illusions. Singer has always stood out against the lures of Modernism. The strength of his ...”

“... of ‘the ink of light’, of ‘writing with pictures’, is immense, as is his faith in young filmmakers and young audiences. Above all Cocteau loyally represents what the cinema might be. ‘What a lesson in freedom you give all of us,’ he quotes Alain Resnais as saying; and Truffaut repaid the lesson by ...”

“... for life’s shortness. The voices can be divided. The experiences of, for example, Kathy Acker or Michael Ignatieff are very different from those of the men and women who arrived in Britain from Africa and Asia. Of these, some had a start in their new lives, some had none. By and large, the blacker and poorer they were, the worse time they had. And many of ...”

“... the Schlumberger fortune (made from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world – neither private nor public, its scale was beyond the means of individual collectors but also outside the domain of art museums ...”

“... laid down by those legendary figures of his paper, C.P. Scott and A.P. Wadsworth, who told their young men to stick to their stories. At a time when grasshoppering has become the journalistic norm, people on both sides of the Belgrano argument will talk to any journalist who has a corpus of knowledge. It’s all very human. Even men and women, even Admirals ...”