“... Graef remains a warm admirer; and in Serenity in Crisis, science comes into his story of how the young de Man absorbed the Fascist programme into his search for truth. He had shown an early interest in the natural and social sciences, as well as literature. The obvious ambition would have been to combine the ‘discourse’ of all three disciplines, and to ...”

“... painted by Jenkins the autobiographer. The canny old pro – and for that matter the not-so-canny young apprentice who was the chrysalis to that butterfly – are massively present in these pages, but you have to dig for them. The storyline leads in a more obvious direction. The dust cover speaks of ‘a man who combined a wide social and literary life with a ...”

“... programme called Becoming a Man, which uses relaxation and meditation techniques to teach young men how to deal with frustration. It’s something, but it does nothing to address inequalities in the city. As I write, Chicago is one of many American cities where riots have broken out following the killing of George Floyd by a city police officer in ...”

“... In Canto 73, Guido Cavalcanti returns from the sphere of Venus to witness the heroism of a young woman who has sacrificed her life for her country by leading the Allied soldiers who had raped her into a minefield. The note of bloody-minded defiance, though far less explicit in the Pisan Cantos, is never wholly absent from them. Pound had intended to ...”

“... Orbánism pits city against country – in Hungary, ‘the people of the plains’ – and young against old. It challenges the established Western faultline that has, on the right, economic liberalism and social conservatism, and, on the left, social liberalism and economic intervention.Orbá​nism was the first politically achieved expression of the ...”

“... lack of grammar and inconsequence’ – comments unlikely to endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect ...”

“... after three infant cousins, whose parents were in India. Her husband was already venerable as a young man, and in old age was universally described as saintly. Montgomery loved him deeply and drew great pleasure from his company. The young wife expected to do so as well but, for all his gentleness of character, the priest ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... its inhabitants have frequently been massacred. Round about 1000 BC, the city was captured by King David. Assuming that he existed – and there is no archaeological or other evidence for him, or for Solomon, Moses or Joshua, outside the Bible, the relevant books of which were written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe – ...”

“... November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie ...”

“... not enough. It is, of course, much too soon to write Kinnock out of the script for good. He is a young man – at 45, four years younger even than David Owen and David Steel; and the electoral college system, with its 40 per cent trade-union weighting, makes him reasonably invulnerable ...”

“... early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer with chickens, bought off, and the long argument between preservers of game and chasers of ...”

“... category that includes a few husbands), proceeding to penitents, martyred matrons (seven young boys among them) and martyred virgins. Like the architecture to which it is wedded, it unfolds, stanza by stanza.Little in the way of physical action is represented, though a notable exception is the penitent actress Pelagia, who raises her arms to remove ...”

“... is here conveniently known, is essentially familiar. Whether it is seen as the tale of the fatuous young charmer and the intriguing, ambitious witch, or, as they themselves chose to present it, as the pathetic picture of two orphans of the storm, victimised by the hound Baldwin, the main facts on which it is based are widely known and the subject of little ...”

“... so-called satirists of That Was the Week That Was, a fashionable programme that made a hero out of David Frost. Deedes was at a loss to blunt so vigorous and novel an attack. He was also present at the midnight meeting called to question ‘Jolly Jack’ Profumo about his private life. Profumo lied like a trooper. Martin Redmayne, who was without doubt the ...”