“... last month set up public inquiries into two monstrous scandals involving serial sexual abuse of young people and children in homes in which they had been placed for their own ‘care’. The first inquiry is into abuse in private and council homes in North Wales and follows an earlier inquiry commissioned by Clwyd County Council (now disbanded) and ...”

“... All his life he kept his distance. At readings and concerts he would notice a young man, gaze at him, make his presence felt and understood, and later, in the semi-privacy of his diaries, record the moment. On Sunday morning, 31 October 1920, for example, when he was still working on The Magic Mountain, he went with Katia, his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later ...”

“... Communists any share of the credit. For the right wing, the Resistance was monopolised by heroic young officers, avatars of the Yorcks, Scharnhorsts and Gneisenaus who roused Prussia to resistance in the Napoleonic era and who they can now join in the nationalist pantheon. This is no worse, admittedly, than the contrary myth propagated in old DDR, that the ...”

“... it aside. More years passed, and he was induced to scribble a one-acter to keep some underemployed young actors happy. The result was A View from the Bridge, full-fledged at last. Later again, watching a brilliant off-Broadway revival, he made another discovery: ‘I suddenly saw my father’s adoration of my sister, and through his emotion, my own.’ The ...”

“... however, is that Maurice Cowling understood the age of Carlyle better than anyone else. It was the young Carlyle, in all his Scottish revolutionary glory, who captured it best. His tragedy, which was even more so that of Jane Welsh Carlyle, is that somehow London and all its works corrupted his vision and his will and his art. Other reviewers of this book have ...”

“... almost painfully joyful about the efforts of these often desperately poor and short-lived young men to make new art in a philistine country, an art that wasn’t epigonal or merely watered-down Impressionism – as one of the rooms in the exhibition puts it, towards a ‘European avant-garde’ (in a European arrière-pays, I suppose). Marc and Macke ...”

“... we got out.’ The one a seasoned and reluctant conscript travelling back to the war; the other a young volunteer, breathlessly presenting himself for duty. Böll’s hero (hardly the word), Andreas, has forgotten to bring his rifle, leaving it behind next to the raincoats in the wardrobe of his friend the chaplain (like some pessimistic no. 11 going to the ...”

“... bottles filled with peanuts vie with beggars for the attention of passers-by. People step around a young man lying on his front in the middle of the pavement, hand outstretched, flip-flops on his elbows to prevent chafing. Francis Obiekezie, who runs a second-hand clothes shop in the market, is one of the many people I have met who take a less positive view of ...”

“... too that we’re too far away in time to be interested in the troubles of a would-be angry young man who missed the 1960s. Dupea’s unfocused distress is very clear, as is his entrapment in privilege. But the movie that isn’t there for me, the one requiring and justifying the ending this one has, would show some depth of pain or anguish in the ...”

“... Africa. Tranströmer, who died last year, trained as a psychologist and all his life worked with young people. Literature – which meant a dozen short volumes of poetry (not more than 250 pages, all told) and a vivid and attractively straightforward memoir of his childhood, also short, called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for ...”

“... and One Nights. ‘It’s better than The Thief of Bagdad.’ He reads Graham Greene, offers his young literary judgments. Proust and Balzac are the ‘2 greatest novelists in the French language’; Daudet shows ‘a mixture of glibness and sometimes vulgarity yet there’s talent there.’ Much later, turning down a proposal for a film of Proust’s Swann ...”

“... the money to get in with the disorganised semi-aristocratic opposition to the Whigs, like a Bright Young Thing bribing his way into the Chelsea Arts Club to get his picture in the Tatler. It was a very un-Byronic ambition. In terms of romantic identities, though, of imitations and of stylisations, the career of the ...”

“... in every sense? The plot-line of the manuscript written and read by fathers and sons concerns a young wandering preacher in 18th-century Pennsylvania. He announces the gospel in the woods, has epileptic fits and visions, is almost killed in a snowstorm and then cared for by a kindly couple; tries to save the life of a ...”

“... conspiracy with unnatural, unreproductive sexuality, the Jew of anti-semitic fantasy enticed young girls from their farm homes to the factory, there to fall prey to perverted Jewish lust. The absence of an intact hymen without any evidence of rape suggested the unthinkable, that the move from country to city had liberated a sexually active Southern white ...”

“... A detective is chatting to a young local at a crime scene, the body a few feet away, all the technicians and policemen going about their business. What has happened, the boy says, is that the dead man, who has been coming every Friday to a craps game on the street and snatching all the money as soon as the pot grew large enough for him, got killed because one of the other players ran out of patience ...”