“... It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.Boswell was plagued by venereal disease and thought his bouts were worse because ‘I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison ...”

“... café I cared for. There were undergraduates I knew at whom Auden made passes, though I was still young and innocent enough to find a pass as remarkable as the person making it.When he died in 1973 his death seemed to me less a loss to poetry – the poetry was largely over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store ...”

“... but sure, to the Widow Bull’s victualling house in Deptford, where in spring 1593 four young men spent a day drinking wine in the garden. Mrs Bull’s house was not a tavern, nor was she a sort of Mistress Quickly, half-expecting a fight to break out as the sun declined. She was a bailiff’s widow, with some court connections; her house was a ...”

“... fell in love with their leading actresses, wrote their major works in six years and died young. More important, they both wrote plays about the impact on the present of the future; Ibsen’s great subject was the impact on the present of the past. In Chekhov’s first great play, The Seagull, the first three acts adumbrate hopes and ambitions that ...”

“... the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come from the rapture of the American young at the unfamiliar emotional and political power of coexisting in public together, body and soul. I have reconnected via Facebook to old friends who might otherwise never have resurfaced, and followed grassroots politics and movements. And I’ve wasted ...”

“... which descends upon a decadent town. The narrator is one of a group of sporting, drinking young hedonists who call to mind, variously, yuppies and lager louts, Essex Men and the Bright Young Things of Waugh and Huxley and Eliot and Scott Fitzgerald. The narrator describes the night of the flood, his glimpse of the ...”

“... local girls with whom Bert – as he then was – became involved during his adolescence and young manhood were so homogeneous in their attitudes and fortunes that they provide a valuable chapter of social history. Jessie Chambers, Alice Dix, Louie Burrows, Agnes Holt, Helen Corke, and others who are less closely relevant, can, with regard to their ...”

“... In a lawsuit brought in 1610 against the nuisance caused by a neighbour’s pigs, the great lawyer Edward Coke, employed in the defence, declared that ‘the building of the house for hogs was necessary for the sustenance of man and one ought not to have so delicate a nose that he cannot bear the smell of hogs.’ Later in the century, a religious writer ...”

“... at a time when their own volatile love affair was still in progress. A clever and confident young woman, she managed to remain friendly with Violet Paget while maintaining her own independence. Ottoline Morrell’s correspondence shows that she heard a good deal at Il Palmerino in 1899 about its owner’s recent and savage falling-out with Bernard ...”

“... of their superior social status in the world; or provocative and combative and rude like Randolph, Edward Stanley, Nigel Birch and others’) and it seems he is unwilling even to be a gentleman. He notes that Somerset Maugham said that Kipling was ‘not quite a gent’. When Kipling said of somebody, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought: ‘How I ...”

“... Liberal Party produced in such numbers. It’s also that so few real opportunities were open to a young woman with a head for politics in that era. There was the suffrage movement, of course, but the exalted martyrdom of the Pankhurst-led militants wouldn’t appeal to everyone, and a slightly older cabal of Newnham and Somerville graduates already had the ...”

“... January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... poor patients call them ‘sir’. They gave extravagant dinners and patronised the arts: the young Henry Wood owed a good deal to the physician George Cathcart. If they were exceptionally well-connected like ‘Tommy’, Lord Horder, they bought their Rolls-Royces from former prime ministers. Where, historians are now asking, is the historical cunning ...”

“... never is; and it was decisively exploded in The Battle Lost and Won, where the focus shifts to the young soldier Simon Boulderstone and the superb evocation of his experience of the Alamein offensive – a rare achievement of informed imagination. It is then we realise that the real subject is the war. Not its causes, or its purpose, not primarily its horrors ...”