“... drives a hundred miles a day to teach at three different campuses. ‘It’s not like I want to rob a bank. What else can I do with a PhD in English?’ Inability to come up with answers to that question, or even to take it seriously, was at the heart of many earnest discussions of the job crisis at the MLA. Faced with the moral dilemma of training ...”

“... father has a heart attack, not before offering Jamal his wristwatch (he thinks they have come to rob him). It’s possible to see in these materials the making of an absorbing and affecting story about an idyllic young love that goes very wrong. But the elements ought to be carefully developed in a narrative that unfolds ...”

“... for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing beside tombs or seated in Gothic cloisters. Most are dressed in the style of 1280, but some in that of 1820, and there are numerous attractive young nuns in timeless habits. Hill illustrates a painting ...”

“... Harold Macmillan reversed the normal progression. Few young men are pompous; that comes later. Pomposity overtook Macmillan when he was still young; long before he was old he had shed all traces of it. The young are seldom boring; as a young man Harold Macmillan was a bore, and in time he became supremely entertaining ...”

“... source of the Bolshevik terror were found in this ‘plebeian terror’, in the desire to rob and expropriate ‘the rich’, which the Bolsheviks then used to strengthen their power. Historians are still a long way from coming to grips with the roots of this plebeian violence and its relation to Bolshevik political fortunes. One problem is their own ...”

“... it round and pushing it down the hill. When this failed and we had been joined by several more young men – you’re never as alone as you think in the African countryside – there was a general pow-wow about the state of my engine. I was still clutching my briefcase, and thought how easy it would be for them to rob me ...”

“... of champagne, even on the high Amazon. The jacket of Travels with a Superior Person shows the young Curzon, resembling a more soigné young Churchill, standing proprietorially before the Pyramids. This is the man who postponed marriage to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a ...”

“... to play themselves upon.’ It was very like William – or her idea of William – to try to rob her of her greatest, her only achievement. She died in March 1892. Looking back on the previous year, she made a note in her diary of the books her brothers had written or published and added: ‘not a bad show for one family. Especially if I get myself ...”

“... attention has been paid to how depressing light entertainment can be: it’s no surprise that young people should be seeking out the challenging music of the post-punk years now, at a time when the public face of the industry is Simon Cowell. Similarly, the teenagers who formed Joy Division found their role models in bands from a previous era that had ...”

“... or the sharp-eyed party animal ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov, a Russian exile who was the darling of young men in the Foreign Ministry. But many are more obscure and their works – the memoirs of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist involved in the clandestine rescue of Jews, or the letters of one of the few men, the Jewish ex-banker Erich Alenfeld – seem not ...”

“... like a work of realism. I saw everyone heading towards cancer, or a case of dementia that would rob them of the memories of the little adulteries they’d probably committed and must have spent their whole lives thinking about. ‘You’re reading them the wrong way,’ someone told me. This too ought to go without saying. Munro’s stories suffer when ...”

“... Why, for instance, ‘Tories, Radicals, and advanced liberals’? Why should a ‘generation of young Liberals’ yield the ‘young liberalism’ of the 1850s and 1860s? On page 53 we meet ‘the reflective Whig or liberal’ yet on page 72 we have ‘the intellectual Whig’s or Liberal’s conception of free ...”

“... Guardian. The discovery that in war both sides do unpleasant things came as a deep shock to the young Liberal. This could not be the fault of the Turks, who were defending ‘their own country’ against ‘foreign invaders’. ‘Obviously,’ says Professor McNeill, ‘a breakdown of older Ottoman patterns of life and manners under the impact of ideas and ...”

“... some to be a reference to his ginger hair. Certainly, ‘we’ – by which I mean a group of four young Leningrad poets that included Joseph and me – found our way to Akhmatova in her last years, and her relations with Brodsky were on a higher level than her relations with the rest of us. She already knew what rank of poet he was in 1964, and we didn’t. A ...”

“... you write a writing, and this is why the total animality of your style is withheld just enough to rob us of your best. I sing. Write! Let your brain become as dumb and cold as a trout in a remote alpine stream, in mid-winter. Because this is what your brain most desires. Then write! And your passion will fatten and flame on the page and we will scream over ...”