“... the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual. ‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would ...”

“... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from ...”

“... there, and then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a ...”

“... years, after which time her husband left for a long interval; at last the wife hears from an angry young gentleman that her husband has run away with the gentleman’s younger sister, an heiress. Either this young woman succeeds in persuading the courts that she is genuinely married (which makes Wife Number One a mere ...”

“... blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... marriage, his growing irritability and an obscure triangular relationship with his wife and a young woman called Leontine Chipman, nicknamed Canada. After Willie’s death his widow Emily and Canada lived happily ever after, until Emily died leaving everything to Canada and nothing to Forster, who was disappointed. The domestic and sexual permutations ...”

“... different countries cheerfully fought against black reaction and military dictatorship.’ The young Marxist intellectual John Cornford was rather more self-possessed: ‘I came out with the intention of staying a few days, firing a few shots, and then coming home. It sounded fine, but you just can’t do things like that. You can’t play at civil war, or ...”

“... cheered them on, the armed freedom fighters numbered no more than 15,000; they were mostly young, and they were ‘deeply nationalist, anti-Soviet and anti-Russian – but not anti-socialist’. ‘Second, the revolution lacked effective leadership.’ It was a ‘bungling performance’. Imre Nagy’s ‘fearless, uncompromising behaviour before the ...”

“... into his head immediately’. In a similarly deadpan tone the narrator remarks that he thought the young man threw a pumpkin, but others have claimed it was a watermelon. The narrator’s inaction at the time, shared with the others who observed the events, segues into a reluctance to make much of the acknowledged political and analytical potential of the ...”

“... the eternal and the modern. The ‘half a Londoner’ he brings into relief is the young man who left his native Dorset for London in the 1860s, and who laboured, during the next two decades, to conquer the city. Even after his permanent return to country life in 1881, he and his wife spent several months a year in the capital, an arrangement ...”

“... words even if guns weren’t involved) became a big issue in Sovietology in the 1970s. There were young people like me who had recently come into the academic field and thought they should be able to write about the Soviet Union the way they wrote about everything else – that is, as objectively as they could. And there were people like Robert Conquest, a ...”

“... owners of Castle Howard and much else. Arnold J. Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had died young in 1883 after a promising beginning as a social reformer and radical economic historian (he is credited with giving currency to the term ‘the Industrial Revolution’); Toynbee Hall in London’s East End is named after him. This skeletal family tree ...”

“... several former inmates. Stories of sexual assault and torture are common. The authors speak to a young Taiwanese woman, ‘Alice’, who was lured to Cambodia on the promise of employment at a tech firm. Within hours of her arrival at a scamming compound in the port of Sihanoukville, her new bosses threatened her with a stun gun, locked her in a room, then ...”

“... editor reproduced a small photograph of a small portrait copied from a very small photograph of a young woman named, so Mossy averred, Nora Joseph Barnacle. A name, I need not tell you, well known by then throughout the world of literature.’ ‘Barnacle?’ said Hunty. ‘But that is a kind of goose.’ ‘Mossy’s story about it was that some ten years ...”

“... along the street to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, passing on the way a covey of priests and earnest young laity en route for a pro-life demonstration. I feel sorry for these devout and less than butch youths (me, once), knowing the priests look down on them, while longing for sterner converts.At first the palazzo seems closed and we have to circumambulate the ...”