“... one,’ he says rather oddly) ‘lost his faith as a direct result of seeing’ that great young man’s performance. After four years of undergraduate life at Oxford, he had to think of a career. After a year at Harvard, he put himself into the hands of one of those London institutions ‘long dedicated to coaching Civil Service candidates’, where ...”

“... but is now published in full for the first time, edited, introduced and ably annotated by Stephen Coan of the Natal Witness. It has the fascination that goes with anything written in 1914, even though the more spectacular events of Armageddon were slated for the adjacent continent. No one should be surprised to come across words now ruled ...”

“... resisted biographical readings in his 2002 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, and, reviewing Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) in the LRB, he deplored ‘the heuristic poverty of biographical explanations of works of art’.* Others, however, including Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the ...”

“... be prime-time viewing. A Frenchwoman, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, helps an ingenious young Dutch Socialist to outwit the Scrooge-like Establishment. Hundreds of millions of pounds are at stake. The rank-and-file defy the mighty. Law confronts power. Three Governments risk being taken to court. All this is part of the story unfolded by Davids ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions ...”

“... these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes. He is part of a cell, or ‘family’, of drifting boys taken up by an old woman who goes by the name of Walt Whitman – whose poetry they ...”

“... Ionce​ witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... was safe. In fact, there were already rumours that all was not well, and stories circulated of young people with CJD. Late in the year the likely tally for 1995 deaths became known. It was well down. You can’t have an epidemic without bodies: the alarm subsided again. Ministers went on saying what they had always said: that the best scientific advice ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’ There ...”

“... were more than mass-hypnotic ephemera. I have to state an interest here: early on in my career a young director working on The South Bank Show who knew me made a film about my work. Bragg came to my house and interviewed me for the programme. But despite this connection, I’m still as surprised as any other long-term Bragg-watcher by quite how much I like ...”

“... of bringing the wanderer back into the fold, and his mother urging him to join Mr Nicholson’s young men’s Bible class. During the summer he escaped to Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of his cousin Maud Babington, and there, in this impressionable mood, he fell passionately in love with the beautiful Frances Jane Sitwell – a woman ten years ...”

“... of Budapest. In 1988, Orbán was one of the founders of a dissident group called the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz). ‘Young’ was meant literally: nobody over 35 was allowed to join. Its members – mostly law students, mostly from the countryside – were libertarians who admired Margaret Thatcher. In ...”