“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... know. I pick my way carefully back, cheered up no end.Later we watch God’s Own Country, about a young and unhappy shepherd in Yorkshire who takes on a Romanian immigrant and is emotionally educated by him, learning to care as much for his fellow man as he does for his sheep. It’s a bleak film, shot somewhere above Keighley I imagine, the farmhouse ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... reading in Picture Post (and probably at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite ...”

“... drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build.’Joyce’s friend John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new ...”