“... her recently remarried father die, and to confront Wanda Fay, his obnoxious wife. Toward this young woman (a ‘ball of fluff’, as Helen McNeil calls her in a fine introduction to the novel, but hard as nails) Eudora Welty shows an unexpected hatred. The ‘scored and grimy’ breadboard Laurel rescues as she prepares to leave the ...”

“... at which it can manageably be renounced altogether. For example, when, near the end of the novel, Stephen Latimer declares that he has fallen in love, genuinely and for real, Miss Morrow’s response is ‘Oh, I see.’ Barbara Pym continues: ‘Miss Morrow had difficulty in keeping her disappointment out of her voice. She had somehow expected something less ...”

“... The coup​ is almost funny, if you squint. The year was 1954, and the CIA, still young and enthusiastic, had decided to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Washington was convinced that the tiny republic was a threat, a reflection of growing anti-communist paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations ...”

“... warned that ‘people, including politicians of all parties, are worried by the failure of many young people now to engage with the institutions of the free society they live in.’ Denied access to the pieties of Our Island Story, a generation of misguided eco-protesters and climate-camp activists might find themselves on the wrong island, at Kingsnorth ...”

“... gab and gags, with men slagging their mothers-in-law and keening to ride (or ‘roide’) brassy young girls. That’s the way Doyle’s men think of women and that’s the way his women think of men and that’s the kind of writer he is. No one writing fiction is better than Doyle at uncovering life inside council houses and getting at the buzz on ...”

“... career is one of the great success stories of Late Victorian letters. In 1871 he was an obscure young architect’s assistant who had just published a barely passable novel, Desperate Remedies. By 1873, on the appearance of A Pair of Blue Eyes, he was enjoying an agreeable intimacy with the formidable Leslie Stephen and ...”

“... of fortune to do with Lydia’s dwindling supply of money, sexual assaults suffered by two young women she and Luca befriend, a murder, a miscarriage, and fatal or near fatal injuries to members of their party while they’re crossing the Sonoran Desert into Arizona.Cummins maintains a balance of terror and treacle by constantly describing the ...”

“... decades; I stopped for a while when I was an untenured professor, and when our children were very young, but I missed it more each year. My wife knows all about it, though I don’t dress as a woman when we’re at home; I do wear nail polish, and girly rings or bracelets, and feminine colours (last month she gave me, and I cherish, a spectacular violet ...”

“... if it was less preposterous than I used to think. Surely it must be good that in sad Uganda young people are carefully reading Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’, and Animal Farm, and Dickens, and the angry recent books of East African writers – Okot’p Bitek’s Song of Lawino, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood? Surely this reinforcement of ...”

“... in his own engaging style, something of a prima donna. Ironically, it was while he was still a young man that Hartley wrote the nouvelle that is in many ways his masterpiece, the one which most perfectly balanced the art of speaking out by not speaking out. Simonetta Perkins is a gem of almost miraculous accomplishment and maturity, despite its obvious ...”

“... to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the ...”

“... Head. Thanks to its blacks London had an air of vibrant cosmopolitanism that attracted the young Wordsworth, for example, emerging from three years of blanched provincialism at Cambridge: Now homeward through the thickening hubbub ... The Hunter-Indian; Moors Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns. By the 19th ...”

“... of European socialism, these rumpled figures, whom it was impossible to imagine had ever been young, provoked awed attention in some students and light-hearted mockery in others. For those who attended, there was an aura of mystery and suffering about these postwar refugees, who had lost country, family and possessions, and suffered multiple ...”

“... of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ‘proliferation of hordes of infants, children, youths and young men and women on the unpaved and unlit streets of the smoky, industrial “frontier” towns’ – frenetically expending what energy they could muster before life closed in on them. Things could only get better. Despite the forcefulness of Edwin Chadwick ...”

“... regime in the US is best described as ‘fascist’, it was hard not to think about Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller and their new friends Zuckerberg and Bezos. The basic governing coalition hasn’t changed all that much: thugs, zealots, careerists, entrepreneurs and grifters. As we left, we were told that there was a café. Run by an Israeli woman, it was ...”