“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in ...”

“... blameless, a ‘promising’ lad; McCluskie and Reynolds were almost parodically delinquent. The young murderers were both from broken homes. Both had suffered physical abuse from stepfathers. At school they had histories of truancy and disruptive behaviour in class. They had experimented with glue-sniffing and drank heavily for their age, or any ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”

“... deportation camps run by Pinochet’s fascists. The fiction which must have originated in the young Perec’s imagination as a form of consoling escapism, not only reflects political reality but also anticipates it. W’s split between the opposite worlds of carefully documented reality and total imaginative freedom is typical of much of Perec’s ...”

“... on the practical advantages of learning, Johnson turns the matter into a mini mock-epic. The young rower is identified with Orpheus, who accompanied the Argonauts on their voyage in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. Boswell’s Johnson, the great hero of letters, enlists the boy in an endorsement of the poet’s power and a pagan search for a prize which has ...”

“... ski jumper Walter Steiner, whose talent he claims to have spotted from the first. ‘This quiet young man had something ecstatic in the way he flew, though technically he still had flaws … His element seemed to be the air, not the earth.’ In 1972 Steiner won gold at the Olympic Games in Sapporo and the World Championships in Planica. In 1974 Herzog made ...”

“... was like without the internet’.In an essay on the work of Jean Piaget, the child psychologist David Elkind used the term ‘cognitive alien’ to suggest just how differently very young children see the world – believing, for instance, that the sun and moon follow them as they walk around. For Elkind, the main problem ...”

“... it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the checks, and our minister smiled hack, and I no longer worried how it looked to others.’ As his ...”

“... United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly prepared for the MLA. ‘J’ai lu David Lodge,’ he boasted, brandishing his tattered copy of Small World. For the first time in 110 years, the MLA held its December meeting in balmy and palmy San Diego instead of frost-bitten Chicago, Toronto or New York. The San Diego convention centre is a ...”

“... futile’. He was what is now known as an abuser. He derived sexual pleasure from causing pain to young boys, especially by smacking their bare buttocks. All the boys at School House, Shrewsbury, knew of this abuse. The identities of Trench’s special victims were also well known. Peel quotes the then headmaster of Shrewsbury, Jack Peterson, describing the ...”

“... of Rick Moody’s previous work, Purple America charts the lives of the ‘slovenly, affluent’ young. It’s not an especially good life. Moody’s characters are distinctly unhappy, unformed, unable to proceed with their lives in anything like a reasonable way. Instead, they gradually succumb to a set of local problems. When the logic of crisis is put in ...”

“... the gods – thighs of oxen and fleecy sheep burning in a blond flame on decorated altars – to young men’s concern for athletics, flute-playing and good times. On the iron grips of shields red-brown spiders spin their webs; rust subdues sharp spears and double-edged swords. There is no noise of bronze trumpets, and sleep – honey for the mind – still ...”

“... cultures – because it both ‘assimilates and homogenises’. Two foreign observers of Italy, David Lane, the Economist correspondent in Rome, and Paul Ginsborg, who teaches at Florence University, are now also arguing that fascism has returned to the country. Lane begins his book on the beaches of Lazio in January/February 1944: ‘That winter was among ...”

“... separate out the thread from the ball – rather than gather it up as Theseus had done. In David Copperfield, Mr Wickfield tells David he will ‘unravel’ a clue. In Great Expectations, Dickens refers to a napkin being wielded like a ‘magic clew’, leading ‘the way upstairs’. In The Moonstone, Gabriel ...”