“... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... stops of women, known as ‘booty patrols’. The following month, the Met paid damages to two young Black men who had been stopped and searched without cause and handcuffed for twenty minutes outside their East London home. An officer involved in the search turned out to have posted frequently in a racist and sexist WhatsApp group chat, one of many used ...”

“... was shown on TV. The film, written by the Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by ...”

“... sole business of her visit is to exercise her eerie powers of thought control and inspire a fresh young man to throw himself into the British firing line, an action without the faintest chance of achieving anything other than the terrible beauty of its sacrifice: ‘They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake,’ Kathleen intones, ‘and for ...”

“... something else again!’ The Pure and the Impure (1932) is Colette’s memoir of her years as a young woman in the Paris of the Belle Époque: sex, drag, public performance, nudity (but never opium, cocaine or ether – she was a fitness freak when she was young). Why Colette, why now, doesn’t seem to be the ...”

“... the liberation of Rome in early 1945 Togliatti came into the headquarters of the PCI to find a young militant preparing copy for L’Unita, the party’s daily newspaper. He was wearing battledress left over from his time with the partisans in the North. ‘Are you very poor, comrade?’ Togliatti asked the startled ...”

“... almost revivalist in their fervour and the spell they cast over the congregation. So when as a young man I first had thoughts about what nowadays is called stand-up it’s not surprising it took the form of a sermon. Like all parodies it was born out of affection and familiarity and the Anglican services that were in my bones, and there is symmetry here as ...”

“... the book juxtaposes early drawings with later paintings of many of these people: first they’re young, and then suddenly they’re older. David Coster (2005). What is also interesting is that the book includes as well various very beautiful abstract or, rather, non-representational paintings done – in colour – by Bachardy. (These are, in ...”

“... uses the word to say what he doesn’t understand about the mild manners of children who die young.                     Murderers are easy to understand. But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is ...”

“... jurists bring to their cases. Sands portrays the Australian Percy Spender and the American Stephen Schwebel, two judges who served as president of the ICJ in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, as legally enrobed imperial apologists – though he doesn’t quite call them that. During a case brought by Liberia and Ethiopia against apartheid South Africa ...”

“... character’. James’s view was not untypical of the masculine response of the time. Leslie Stephen, a friend and near-contemporary of Mrs Gaskell, regarded her achievements in much the same light as he would have done those of his own daughter; and Jenny Uglow is surely right to stress the implicit comeback in the Gaskell novels, which show them both ...”

“... was, she says,born into the ocean of story, or on its shores. I was the first child of a lively young scientist who loved his country and his zoology. My mother died – he mothered me. I went to bed early and with the light falling from the street lamp through the open slats of the venetian blind he, with one foot on the rather strange bed I had, told his ...”

“... unpopular decisions about rearmament. More sympathetically, though with some equivocation, G. M. Young in his official ‘life’ suggested that, whatever the faults of Baldwin’s substantive policies, he at least deserved credit for having forged a united political nation, able to meet the crisis of 1940. Few have been prepared to see much virtue in ...”

“... of poverty’ – he’s not talking about poverty as a social evil here, but giving advice to a young man who wants his father to give him a larger allowance. This is the kind of problem that Epictetus’ version of Stoicism is designed to address: a privileged man is disturbed by the idea that he does not have complete control over every element of his ...”