“... 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 ...”

“... and alliances: these, too, are chilly calculations of convenience, which last only as long as young girls and roses, to quote de Gaulle. National interest comes first, last and always. We need, I think, to unpick the sovereignty argument a little, to get at the foundations of the overarching assertion about national interest. Suppose we take as a starting ...”

“... of this sort, perhaps he didn’t; either way, the visit to Matoussaint marks the point at which young Vingtras’s future is decided, and it won’t be the future his father has had in mind for him. He is lent books that aren’t at all the sort of thing he’d been encouraged or allowed to read up until now, books that the ‘jacobin’ journalist has been ...”

“... or a believing wife from an unbelieving husband. Age was superior to youth, and ‘self conceyted young men’ a constant menace. ‘The greatest number of Papists’ were ‘very yonge men’ and the most contentious Puritans were ‘for the most parte … men of yong yeeres & superficiall vnderstanding’. As for the common people, they were not entitled to ...”

“... make good on at least some of the comparisons listed above. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young man from a poor Italian family who has moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. He had previously been seen as a boy in Wait until Spring, Bandini; he had also been the protagonist of the then unpublished The Road to Los Angeles, and was later to appear ...”

“... bisexual, transgender and queer’ people, while trolling communities disproportionately comprise young white men in Anglophone or Nordic countries. Phillips describes the way they perform their whiteness and a particular type of masculinity – their racist trolling of Obama, for example, or their habitual use of the term ‘fag’. Masculinism is built into ...”

“... conversation, from Achebe on ‘English and the African Writer’, through Terence Ranger on Roger Casement, to Paul Theroux on Tarzan, a send-up of expatriate attitudes and an early example of cultural studies in Africa.Shortly after Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in Ghana in 1966, Mazrui published ‘Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar’, which he followed up with ...”

“... of Dulles, as revealed by Gaddis’s careful analysis of his papers. Lord Sherfield, who as Sir Roger Makins was British Ambassador in Washington in the Fifties, once remarked that Dulles was a man who developed his thinking aloud from one meeting to the next. If, like the British Ambassador, you saw him frequently, the trend of his thought would be ...”

“... happened despite open hostility from establishment figures in the music industry (musicians like Roger Daltrey and George Harrison, executives like BPI bigwig Maurice Oberstein). The revolution is all the more threatening to rock culture because music-makers operating in black and club music (notably hip-hop and house) have plugged into the new technology ...”

“... He was in attendance at the birth of English art history. It is not sufficiently well-known how young the discipline is in this country: that no courses in the field existed until 1931 when the Courtauld Institute was established, that before then one studied the subject, as Blunt himself did, by ‘reading’. Blunt began lecturing at the Courtauld in the ...”