“... the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young black man is out to assassinate him. Organised as a set of flashbacks from the bedside colloquy between Hickman and the dying Sunraider, the rest of the novel fills in the history of the two men. If Callahan is right about the material now called ...”

“... Wairimu is on her way to fetch water, when a bend in the path brings her face to face with a young man. The young man is Waitito, son of Njuguna, and his effect on the 17-year-old Wairimu is immediate and deep. The nature of the encounter is not made clear. For Wairimu it has a visionary, fairy-tale quality, and ...”

“... also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’, Yeats called him) posing in Rapallo in 1930 or 1931 on the cover of A Strong Song Tows Us and the New Directions Complete Poems, to the waggingly eyebrowed, scruff-bearded, snaggle-toothed, twinkling-eyed ...”

“... among neglected or un-neglected writers. Early in Chao’s book, Onetti recounts the visit of a young man who tells him that his best book is Los Adioses (Farewells), 1954. Onetti says this is his own favourite too, but critics have preferred El Astillero (The Shipyard), 1961. ‘No, absolutely not,’ the young man ...”

“... time for a new look. The novelty consists mainly in the use made of some political writings of the young Lamb, who is now more firmly placed than before in the culture of metropolitan radical journalism, with its dash of Godwinian ideas and mild Jacobin sympathies. And she gives very careful accounts of Lamb’s friendships; his various journalistic ...”

“... role.Born to a valetudinarian father and a mother, Helvia, about whom little is known, the young Cicero received the education in Greek and Latin normal for a well-off child of the equestrian order. (Roman citizens who met a certain threshold of wealth were equestrians, able to pursue either the sort of political career in Rome that might win them ...”

“... work had been done and everybody’s summer wasn’t being wasted in a Norfolk hell-hole.’ Michael, her husband and the children’s stepfather, is a university lecturer, who plans to spend the summer having illicit sex whenever possible with his latest favourite student, Philippa Knott, whose mobile number he keyed into his phone before the end of ...”

“... however, was the curious legend of Sappho’s disastrous passion for Phaon, a handsome young ferryman whose rejection of her is said to have prompted her suicide. (In the classic account, beset by love-anguish, she is supposed to have leapt from the Leucadian cliffs into the roiling sea below.) Ovid dramatised the suicide story in the Heroides (a ...”

“... of the troubles, but it retains the drab charm of an insistent ordinariness. It is a place where young people worry about boyfriends and clothes (‘I was looking at a suit the other day. It was made up of lovely autumny shades’) and jobs and getting away, as they would in any other stifling province that was also home. Men snap and demand service; women ...”

“... lover, and Rudolph Valentino’s; two of the men she loved died suddenly and tragically young; her lovers were gamblers, crooners, actors, aviators; her two husbands were aristocrats; she was by turns one of America’s most adored stars and a hate figure; Ronald Reagan invited her to his inauguration; she was Hitler’s favourite actress. Negri ...”

“... contains a good deal of ego-boosting romantic fantasy. A ravishing, sexually magnetic impoverished young woman lords it over a rich lover, half-mad with desire. On losing her virginity, the 15-year-old girl gains a sexual knowingness, an experience of jouissance as the Lacanians like to say, that makes her feel superior to other women, notably her mother. The ...”

“... a very different key and context, though no less disconcerting, consider the bare question of the young Malaysian, Shafi, to V.S. Naipaul some twenty years ago: ‘What is the purpose of your writing?’ Naipaul was gathering material for Among the Believers (1981). Safe as houses and translating freely, though completely lacking Heaney’s subtle ...”

“... last three years would have given them: equally he might want them merely because, in the 1960s, young men and women of the kind he needed could be recruited only as graduates. A phenomenon which might perhaps be termed (however clumsily) defensive credentialism was already apparent by the time of the Robbins Report, nursing training being perhaps its most ...”

“... consisted of her reading out loud an impossibly long series of German sentences, then making her young son repeat each in turn after her, and commit them to memory for repetition on the following day. If his repetitions were less than perfect, as inevitably happened, the child would find himself the object of his mother’s scorn. The rigours of this ...”

“... Finally, in 63 BCE, his luck ran out. Age had taken its toll. Nearly 70 years old, no longer the young Alexander of his coins and his portraits, Mithridates had long since lost his aura of invincibility. Stranded in the Crimea, the farthest corner of an empire that had once stretched from the Caucasus to mainland Greece, he was powerless: his treasuries were ...”