“... offered a seat if the bus or tram were crowded. In London I can never get to a seat in time – a young boy or girl always gets in ahead of me. Now I am back in England and what do I find? The affair of the Falkland Islands is again running in full spate. The Franks Committee had completed its investigations before I returned. It seemed to be high ...”

“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...”

“... to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical student leader young enough to be her son. When the President’s wife meets her young man at a Chicago hotel during his furlough from the Army, the Counter-Intelligence Corps bugs their adjoining rooms; video technology would have provided ...”

“... through the net of comparisons. It’s perhaps not beside the point to recall that when a very young man, Walser wanted to be an actor, and while that ambition may have been squelched in the course of a typically humiliating encounter with an established actor who merely motioned towards the door, there remains something protean about him, even as a ...”

“... Oh what a lovely war: of a general who stubbornly year after year consigned scores of thousands of young soldiers to horrible deaths in pursuit of an insane strategy, using outmoded tactics under conditions he did not begin to understand. Only the most traditionally-minded, on the one hand, and the most sophisticated, on the other, found very much to say for ...”

“... but it won’t hurt to look at its chief characters and implications. Our first innocent is a young Englishman called Leonard Marnham, an electrician involved in the wiring of the equipment in the aforementioned tunnel. He meets Maria, an attractive German woman, and McEwan’s prose enters a realm of stealthy double-entendre which recalls the hint-filled ...”

“... each sentence generates too much commentary. But here is a fragment of complaint from A&O: M = m. Young folks = nowadays – and whole movements too, à la Marxism – ’r enemies a tradition. And We for our = part’r strangers n the realms a modern art & the temper a the times. If the mannerism is to be justified, one must assume that each slight oddity ...”

“... my quotations have shown, and Sabbath’s insatiable sexual interests – his eagerness to wrap young girls’ underwear around himself, for example – are meant to bother us as well as entertain us. But they do finally shut him and us off from the world beyond the private parts. This exclusivity is part of his pathos as a figure, what makes him worth a ...”

“... on salvers by Cantonese in white jackets, in the wake of the trays of all-important drinks. A young woman walked, stately, with a flowered parasol, while colonels told about typhoons and a golden spaniel gasped beneath a chair.’Many of the characters’ names are words, so that one occasionally has the feeling of having stumbled into an allegorical ...”

“... of something better. Odysseus, when he returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, is abused by the young oligarchs who seek the hand of his wife, Penelope. In his beggar’s disguise he is the smallholder, the landless citizen: his revenge vents the frustrations of an entire class, and the pervasive viciousness of the Odyssey’s gods indicts the whole social ...”

“... trial might help to sway those who are predisposed to sympathise with him. Countless dissatisfied young men and women across the Islamic world will be watching the trial closely – parts of it, at least, will probably be broadcast live on TV. The trial needs to satisfy Arab more than Western opinion. The most significant problem with the Iraqi tribunal is ...”

“... rather as Elisabeth in Siblings brings painting. The Stasi got in touch, sending her an appealing young man to conduct a four-hour interview, the meaning of which she didn’t understand for several weeks afterwards. When her husband was put in prison for six months for resisting arrest and hitting a policeman, she was slow to see the connection or the ...”

“... that the experience had determined him to devote his life to music rather than medicine, ‘like a young man born to be a sailor who, having seen only the little boats on the lakes of his native mountains, found himself suddenly transported to a three-deck ship on the high seas’. It is no surprise that Berlioz’s full conversion took place after hearing a ...”

“... to undermine any attempt by the Labour Government to maintain trade links with the Russians. The young President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, was committed to maintaining these links. His trips to Russia, and especially his plans to sell old aircraft to the Russians, were more than once sabotaged by MI5. The ...”

“... barmaid at The Horse and Groom where he has so often been manic or depressive. Before long he has young, polyandrous Virginia in his dead father’s bleak house and she has learned to cite the Book of Ruth, saying: ‘I have washed and anointed myself. Spread your skirt over me.’ All goes merry as a marriage-bell. Never was a tale of depression less ...”