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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the warrior bands of the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded Rome. The military service of young aristocrats in a lord’s household coincides with the beginnings of vassalage as described by Bloch, originating in an atmosphere heavy with the odour of household bread. The world of chivalry was a world where men were linked to each other by strong ...”

“... studies (while her brother forged ahead) and longed for adventure. In 1924, she joined the German Young Communists’ League and was coshed by a policeman at a demo. Her disapproving parents found her a job in a bookshop, where she was allowed to dust the books but not read them. At nineteen, she joined the KPD, read Die Rote Fahne and kept a Luger hidden ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... on which the American paedophiliac liberationist David Sonnenschien gives advice: ‘Most very young or small kids cannot and should not be penetrated by an adult penis or a dildo. Sometimes a finger is OK, but even with a finger lubrication is recommended. And watch those fingernails!’ On a purely utilitarian calculation the actions imagined here could ...”