“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of age, have never been near a woman.’ He tells us about a girl he kissed and then lost as a young man (as happens with Lydia and Arvid in The Serious Game), about his difficulties believing the facts of life when he was told them as a boy. He passes whores in the street, he is sent an intimidating bunch of roses by the bold Eva Mertens (again, something ...”

“... one of the gens du monde, ‘a high-flyer, a metropolitan man’, literary-lioning it in London. Young admirers come up to him in pubs and say: ‘Mr Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s. An authorial confidence informs us that it was originally conceived with more melodramatic action ...”

“... know transfigured me In one brief moment for eternity. From one brief meeting with someone so young, Dante was translated to a higher sphere and left our days of dung. It’s my opinion my friend Michael Hofmann is a wizard. Every page of German, Hofmann eats a gizzard, Translates the untranslatable ...”

“... way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate.’ Michael Ignatieff was born in Canada in the 1940s. ‘My friends,’ he remarks a little sheepishly at the start of his book, ‘had suburban pasts or pasts they would rather not talk about. I had a past of Tsarist adventurers, survivors of revolutions, heroic ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... Oxford college is likely to leave its mark on any man – and on any college. There was, for a new young fellow like myself, no shortage of AJP stories, by no means all apocryphal. How, at one college meeting, Alan had proposed that the chapel be turned into a swimming-pool. How Alan had loathed the loathsome Dylan Thomas. How Alan had crossed swords with ...”

“... had come to address his college’s literary society. When Amis eventually asked for questions, a young woman said something that came as a surprise. ‘Can you give us your “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” face?’ she asked. (Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, is keen on making faces, and is stumped at the end of the book because he is more or less happy, and ...”

“... Ciaran Thapar that she felt ‘a growing sense of doom’ when she started being asked to help young people, particularly teenage boys, travel home without using public transport. If all else failed, she booked them minicabs. The teenagers Knell-Taylor worked with were caught up in a growing wave of tit-for-tat violence. Local rivalries and adolescent ...”

“... In the village of Les Estables, near the mountain of Gerbier de Jonc, where the Loire rises, a young geometer participating in the first attempt to map the whole of France is hacked to pieces by the locals. We are in the early 1740s: an increasingly powerful monarchy is seeking to control the ‘jumble of old fiefdoms’, but the rural population see ...”

“... his one attempt at loving someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, ‘How kind you are to yourself,’ and tells him to ‘rest easy’. ‘After all,’ she says, ‘that is where your happiness lies.’ Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a ...”

“... usual suspects) peasants attending a market fair unleashed their rage on a hapless young nobleman named Alain de Monéys, a short, balding bachelor with ‘a local reputation for politeness and generosity’ who had made the mistake of arriving at the fairground in the wake of his despised cousin, Camille de Maillard. Accused by the crowd of ...”

“... way, she was in touch with many hundreds of people. What Remains has her being visited by a young woman writer, getting poems from a young man, discussing the future (What Remains) after a reading: unofficial channels – she was denied access (she says) to East German radio and television. She seems always to have ...”