“... supplies of espresso. They might have been less familiar with the groups of casually attired young men and women, who occasionally pulled off their jackets to reveal guns resting in their holsters. ‘The Mafia as we have known it for one hundred and fifty years is dead,’ Orlando announced, restlessly drawing diagrams on the blotting paper in front of ...”

“... marriage in ‘Modern Manners’, a poem first published in 1799 and reprinted recently by Roger Lonsdale in his Oxford anthology of Eighteenth Century Women Poets, she took for granted that the most direct route to separate property was to marry for money and chuck the husband. In ‘former times’, according to a speaker named Flirtilla, ‘hearts ...”

“... reasons, the two were at one when it came to making bad blood. ‘Never tell lies,’ the young Connolly had adjured himself, except ‘to damage the character of a friend’. He lived down to this, and so did they all. The hero of his novel The Rock Pool recalled the boredom of college life and ‘the quiet afternoons spent running up bills in ...”

“... her, we see him, out of focus, emerge from the dust of the bomb-blast. The shot is well framed – Roger Pratt deserves his Oscar nomination for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of ...”

“... Careau’s new Chéri. Another reason may be the quality of some of the translations of her work: Roger Senhouse’s widely used version from 1951, as Careau points out, has phrases like ‘Oh, my sainted aunt’, not to mention ‘a Chinee’. In her introduction to Eprile’s rendition, Thurman blames a generational narcissism which blocks readers from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”