“... to the artists about whom he wrote: Blake, Poussin, Borromini. In this account, Blake is the young man’s artist. Carter makes no comment on this: her book provides a limited account of Blunt’s work as an art historian. But she does make it quite clear that Blunt was attracted by Poussin long before he took an interest in Blake. His most significant ...”

“... simple remedies and evangelical tone. But her confident certainties are echoed on the other side: Michael Foot condemns her for praising Victorian values ‘without even a passing comprehension of the human suffering and indignity which the mass of our people had to endure in that pre-democratic age’. The term ‘Victorian’ is used purely descriptively in ...”

“... a classroom text in Ireland and abroad, is explicitly about the Belfast of the Troubles. Its hero, Michael, is a failed poet turned Belfast hotel manager. One day he decides he will finally tell his wife that he is leaving her. But that evening the IRA take them both captive and compel him to drive a bomb into his hotel car park to assassinate an Ian Paisley ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”

“... says he spends more time on soccer than in his office. God knows why, he exclaims with a grin. Two young co-ordinators, street lads who look as tough as hell, flip through the membership cards of their group and nod seriously at Ahmad’s instructions. The old pattern of local football clubs everywhere: businessmen and shopkeepers on one side, working classes ...”

“... picture etc in the National Socialist newspapers on exhibit. The town was dominated by the type of young person who walks through the streets vaguely determined, offering the Roman salute.’ Cultural greatness in decline and the juxtaposition of Goethe with Hitler – these are the two narrative axes along which ...”

“... the Fleet manoeuvres of September 1898 he recited some of his verses at a ship’s concert. The young men who then carried him shoulder high round the quarterdeck had little taste for nice discriminations. Fortunately their loud voices could sometimes be drowned by Indian echoes. The effects of the Lahore Club were not wholly had. There would have been no ...”

“... in the plot, or one for two hours of the movie and another for five minutes. She is the dim young thing that Newland and the narrator think she is (‘she had died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own’), until the sudden switch comes. Then she is the awesome infant matriarch, the enveloping mother who ...”

“... the like. Another important effect in Fanny’s initiation ceremony is that its setting – six young people in an elegant, brilliantly-lit drawing-room watching two others copulating – underlines the power of the orgasm. Each of the girls becomes completely absorbed as she copulates, and reaches a ravishing climax – in Fanny’s case twice, inducing a ...”

“... living alone, and the increase in women’s marrying age. It is reasonable to suppose that for young nurses, hospital orderlies and tea ladies increasingly living on their own or bringing up children on their own, the old pattern of rational acquiescence in low pay has become irrational. And dishonourable. From being an interlude, public-sector employment ...”

“... often unpredictable, as many traders discovered to their cost. When the American captain Gideon Young shipped two tonnes of the medicinal sea plants known as ‘squills’ to Brown & Ives in Rhode Island, the merchants could not sell them. Having paid the burdensome tariff levied on all such imports, Brown & Ives re-exported the plants that hadn’t already ...”

“... exactly they are looking at. In 28 Days Later, Cillian Murphy’s first ‘infected’ victim is a young boy. As he pins the raging lad down, the boy spits out, ‘I hate you,’ voicing that adolescent contempt that all parents sometimes hear. That single line of dialogue is a clear infringement of the genre rules, but an intriguing one. If the boy ...”

“... 2003, the PDP had a simple slogan: ‘Power, power, power.’ Wale Ajadi to0k me to a gathering of young activists and ex-militants at a Port Harcourt hotel and I asked some of them who they were planning to vote for. They said they weren’t necessarily going to opt for Jonathan just because he was from the delta. They wanted new infrastructure projects in ...”

“... friend and protégé of Robert Capa, who works for the Magnum agency, and has disappeared. A young man, our narrator, meets Jansen (‘when I was 19’) and offers to sort and catalogue his work. Jansen is friendly, but aloof, distracted, avoiding all his old friends, not answering the telephone, hiding from visitors. He is plainly living in the ...”

“... Chance in the Bowels of the Earth. The narrator addresses us as ‘my faithful readers’ or ‘my young readers’, adopts a verbose and patronising diction to match, and presents us with a dog who appears to be reading Henry James. Well, surely is reading Henry James, because when asked what his book is he says, ‘Rr Rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rrf-rrf’, easily ...”