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“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... Songs of PapuszaI was once besotted with a black-eyed boy. The young menof my kumpania stretched him out in an àshariba. Only thendid Dion´yzy Wajs, ancient Dion´yzy Wajs, pay his coin and court.He possessed harps, bought my mother and stepfather’s heart.All I possessed were secret books. Dion´yzy arranged my bedas we both wished ...”

“... of ‘Whatever happened to … ?’ So who was he? Michael Ovitz was born in Chicago in 1946 to David, the son of Jewish Romanian immigrants. David was a liquor salesman for Seagram’s but he worked weekends too, selling patio furniture to support his family after they moved to Encino in the San Fernando Valley. ‘The ...”

“... her father in Epping Forest. Poor Cibber handed over his money, making only the rueful reproof: ‘Young man, young man! This is a sorry trade. Take heed in time.’ ‘And so I would,’ replied his disguised daughter, ‘but I’ve a wicked hunks of a father, who rolls in money, yet denies me a guinea. And so a worthy ...”

“... Michael Young is a rarity among sociologists: he has a feel for the people he writes about, and he writes well. When he takes us into a Merseyside factory and walks us around in the company of Joe Murgatroyd, works superintendant, we can hear the shoes clopping, the machines humming or missing, we can see the workers cocking an ear, and we can feel the anxiety of the foremen running to keep things in hand ...”

“... in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s misfortune leads him to wish he had children, to reassess his relationship with his parents, and to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... beauty causing turmoil and consternation. Socrates astonished even himself: he was used to finding young men attractive, but Charmides was something else. Even the youngest boys in the room turned to stare, gazing at him ‘as if he were a statue’. By now, perhaps, too many page-three captions in the Sun and too many lectures from Andrea Dworkin have taken ...”

“... is a rebuke to history teachers in schools for many generations – and not only English ones. David Hume’s eight-volume History of England was as unsympathetic and diminishing to his native Scots as the work of Stubbs and Hallam. The modern scholar, by contrast, makes his own journey into fields he has never penetrated. This is not a handing-down from ...”

“... in Janesville, this doctrine was a gift – just as it had been once for Alan Greenspan, a young cultist before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve and presided over the bubble and collapse of the Clinton and Bush years. What signal did Romney send by choosing Ryan? He is on the ticket to make sure that Romney will let Wall Street write its own ...”

“... lives inside it. The first, The Movie Brats, succeeds because it keeps close to the work of the young film-makers with whose careers it’s concerned, but also because they demonstrably exist as a group. Coppola, Milius, Scorsese, De Palma, Lucas and Spielberg do have a great deal in common. Moguls, on the other hand, is one of those unhappy publishing ...”

“... as wife and mother. Though Ghosts was famously reviled as obscene, Ibsen remained silent as two young writers were jailed for writing ‘immoral literature’ in defence of sexual equality. He was the romantic nationalist who hoped that Italian unification would not bring about ‘too many changes to the usual way of things’, the erstwhile champion of ...”

“... these tend to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever ...”

“... not least as a way of explaining the fall of the ‘Red Wall’ nearly twenty years later. As a young man in the mid-1970s, Makin-Waite became involved in a campaign against two councillors from the National Party (an offshoot of the National Front) who had been elected in Blackburn, like its neighbour Burnley a former cotton town. He became ‘a serial ...”

“... There are also fearsome glimpses of melodrama, or worse – a quarrel springing up among Gig Young, George Hamilton and Elizabeth Montgomery. And there’s absolute vacancy – as in one picture of Edie Goetz, a daughter of Louis B. Mayer. These pictures say so much more than discreet testimony could ever allow. Even if he was never a sure ...”