“... and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to ...”

“... I feel at least, that he [Sainte-Beuve] is a man of the past, of a dead generation; and that we young Americans are (without cant) men of the future… We are Americans born – il faut en prendre son parti. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. Five years later, he wrote to Charles ...”

“... their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing hothead, insisting always upon relevance and social engagement, would object to being compared with Holmes. As Lewis Thomas is none of these things, he will not mind it being said that his opening paragraph is very much in Holmes’s style: ‘I ...”

“... Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official ...”

“... the dustbin of outmoded signs and symptoms or the waste-tip of an age of faith. When we think of young adults in the West, driven by secular demons of unknown provenance to starve and purge themselves, and to pierce and slash their flesh, we wonder uneasily if she is our sister under the skin. Gemma is far less famous than her contemporary Thérèse of ...”

“... only made public on Minnie’s 17th birthday in 1858, during which Edward supervised his young cousin’s education and demanded she come up to scratch as a correspondent (‘Minnie is a most affectionate creature but from her letters one could scarcely think so’), they were married in 1859. The wedding night and honeymoon, according to ...”

“... to be written down, but like other such offers, this one is made only, I think, when one is fairly young. Most of us are self-sentenced to a year or more of un-epiphanic hard labour, made worse by a suspicion that it’s all a waste of time anyway. Morning after morning you go unwillingly to the desk, always accompanied by the treacherous notion that after all ...”

“... in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and ...”

“... take time out to write what she called her ‘fun’ novel, Fledgling (2005), about a melanated young vampire called Shori, whose people – the Ina – secrete a hormone in their saliva that bonds their victims to them, whereupon they move happily into polygamous communes, to live as ‘symbionts’. ‘It isn’t very good,’ Butler fretted, and I think ...”

“... One evening last September, millions of viewers watched three young men forge a Modigliani sculpture live on Italian television. Three things distinguished the programme from other forgers’ At Homes, such as the BBC’s regular visits to the studio of Tom Keating (a sale of whose work had raised £274,000 at Christie’s that very day ...”

“... as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis ...”

“... This thorny question deserves more space than Tharoor has room for in his polemical essay. Francis Robinson, in his study Separatism among Indian Muslims (1974), was inclined to spread responsibility three ways: while Hindu nationalism and the Muslim minority’s fear of being swamped certainly contributed, he concludes firmly that ‘there can be no ...”

“... institutions. Anti-Oedipus, translated into Italian in 1975, resonated with many of Italy’s young desiring machines, notably Franco Berardi (‘Bifo’), a radio broadcaster in Bologna, who read the book in a prison cell – he’d been charged with placing a bomb in the headquarters of the Christian Democrats in Bologna. By spring 1977 Bifo was leading ...”

“... Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly abandoned it after the death of his father. He describes his youth as full of the usual ‘vanities’ – fashions, feasts, amorous dalliances. These, we are led to believe, took place before he ...”

“... and reassesses Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World (1977). A stocky heavy-headed young man, I used to see him at Oxford seemingly always on his way back from squash. I knew at the time he was formidably clever and from a distance (with me it was always from a distance) fancied him rotten. On reflection, it was partly his name I found so ...”