“... when an American Navy diver was brutally murdered – an act for which Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a young Lebanese Shi’ite, is currently on trial in Frankfurt. The prospect of an end to the Gulf War may ease Muslim anger but is unlikely to end it. It sometimes seems that militant Islam was spawned by Ayatollah Khomeini, and hence that it is no more than a ...”

“... a scaur of limestone that formed the jamb of a narrow cave. At my feet I noticed a kestrel, a young one, crouching motionless on the grass with wisps of down still clinging to its head. I looked for its parents and saw them perched on two outcrops eighty yards away, as still as their fledgling, pointing at me as intently as compass needles. True, the turf ...”

“... and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was still engaged in forging itself – as, indeed, it still is – and novelists saw themselves as the chief chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to ...”

“... to the age of being a chaperon (‘By the bye,’ she wrote at 32, ‘as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon, for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like’), Jane Austen kept the question of marrying open in fantasy. In a private nonsense joke she promised to marry the ...”

“... suggestions and justify his frequent frenetic trips to knocking-shop and suburban poke-in. It was Edward Albee who observed, in Zoo Story, that when Americans are young they have dirty pictures as a substitute for the real thing, and when they grow up they have the real thing as a substitute for the dirty pictures. This ...”

“... recipes that survive come from books of instruction for squires in their years of education, for young men seeking service in noble households or for the upwardly mobile middle classes. The Parisian householder’s specimen menus are incorporated in a book of instruction for his young wife, who was a quarter his age – 15 ...”

“... her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but below it she was tearing her napkin into shreds. This was not in the script.’ At home, she never appeared before 6 p.m. This was the only time of ...”

“... emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and Titus Andronicus, and it is, on the whole, less satisfactory. There’s a skimpiness and loss of subtlety suggesting haste and a looming word limit. But Hattaway is never less than stimulating. Indeed, the faults of his book are those of ...”

“... Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman). It killed at least ten million young men and wounded at least twenty million more. It disorganised the international system in immensely destructive ways. Without this conflict it is difficult to imagine the October Revolution of 1917, the rise of Stalinism, the ascendancy of Italian ...”

“... sunken, lustrous invalid eyes (he had nightmares about finding himself in bed with a fat woman), young men with the kind of body you now see in jeans advertisements, Greek drapery, Renaissance bowers and flowers, all seen in a curious dusky light – his people flee the sun like ghosts at cock-crow and come out as the last light gilds the hilltops, their ...”

“... attracted opprobrium when as the administrator of an asylum he connived in the kidnapping of a young woman, Edith Lanchester, who had been driven mad, or so her family believed, by ‘over-education’. Lanchester’s plight – disenfranchised, yet thoroughly surveilled – goes some way to explaining the enthusiasm of Murray’s 624 female ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”

“... was planted in the West Indies after 1815 by army officers with much time on their hands. Soon the young sons of slaves were required to bowl at the young sons of slaveowners, but the bowlers – the servant class – began to practise batting and got quite good at it. When formal organisation began, the structure of West ...”

“... that cannot be done on two wheels. On the last page of this opulent book is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of ...”

“... Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock is from the British Museum’s own holdings. One of the four Edward Hopper etchings is Evening Wind. A naked girl kneeling on a bed looks out through an open window. Curtains billow inwards. Her head, turned from you, is hidden by long hair which is pushed about by the wind. In East Side Interior another ...”