“... His first sexual fantasy was of lying naked on a battlefield. Such are the images that can speed a young person into prose, living out the reality of a martyred mother and a dead father. His first attempt at authorship was ‘The History of My Friends’, a tiny manuscript he dictated to his mother. It taught him, Bucknell writes, that ‘friendship could be ...”

“... incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos ...”

“... past absorbed by Cartier-Bresson also comprised such giants of photography as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another ...”

“... the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest son, Edward; when he went up to Oxford she moved the whole family along with him, and continued there with him, and still kept ...”

“... asks Hingley, querying de Mallac’s rather coy observation that his hero, like the young Tolstoy, ‘was not above calling on ladies of easy virtue,’ and that this ‘will be documented by some later, less bashful biographer’. But can it be? asks Hingley. There is no evidence one way or another. De Mallac’s suggestion is illustrative of ...”

“... when she eats it, the flame of love for Ivan flares in her heart. Ugrešić’s Ivan is Mevlo, a young masseur at the beauty farm, he is a Bosnian orphan with a heart of gold, who has suffered from a permanent erection ever since a bomb exploded beside him in Sarajevo. He will find the egg, and there will be a beautiful future for him too ...”

“... Monterrey cigars and giant spiders; a menacing black servant with eyes glowing like coals; a naked young woman supine on a stone altar, breasts heaving, knife raised over her throat. But only a minority of his novels involve devil-worship; Baker’s title ties together the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social ...”

“... between the monks at Whitby and Durham; by 1670 it was a farming hamlet of 90 people. But when Edward Pease’s Stockton and Darlington Railway was having problems exporting coal from Stockton – the River Tees was too shallow at that point for ships to get through – they chose to extend the line to Middlesbrough, where the Tees was deeper. The ...”

“... in Warsaw, telling him what a good girl she has been in fending off the attentions paid her by the young schlimazels on the train to Marienbad. Thus did Margery Pinchwife virtuously tell her old husband: ‘He put the tip of his tongue between my lips and so mousled me – and I said I’d bite it. He’s a proper goodly strong man; ’tis hard, let me tell ...”

“... with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their stars, no longer occupy the same place in our imaginations. ‘Remember River ...”

“... study lies largely in the unfolding inevitability of this morality tale. The movement from the young Maudling, working genially alongside Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell in the late 1940s – Rab Butler’s three brilliant young men, all potential prime ministers – to the later figure, greedy, corrupt, drinking himself ...”

“... anatomised Isherwood with a typically cold eye: Stripped, I am no Adonis. My body looks fairly young because it is soft and not heavily muscled. My shoulders are narrow, and my hips too big. Nevertheless, as long as I hold myself well and remain full-face to the audience, my figure looks passably good – or, at least, quite cosy to lie on. When I turn ...”

“... the British and their Free French allies. Churchill’s man with de Gaulle was Major General Edward Louis Spears, half-English, half-Irish by birth, French by upbringing and education, a career British cavalryman whose two languages (he had also qualified as an Army Interpreter in German), courage (four times wounded) and temperament had made him a name ...”

“... illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In 1881 the Haggards had returned to Britain, leaving their fellow settlers to buy and sell the veldt for what it would fetch, or dig vast holes in search of gold and diamonds. Haggard had then ...”

“... case, the sons of his friends and former colleagues are swimming with the New Labour tide: Edward and David Miliband, sons of his old friend Ralph; Charles Clarke, son of Benn’s former Permanent Secretary, and so on. Some of the most poignant moments come when the Millbank machine tries to whip in its oldest member, reducing him in May 1999 to ...”