“... close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an unsuccessfully defended murderer – but usually, death. He is a man who has devoted himself to shrinking feeling to the point where the renunciation of a ...”

“... is a singularly fitting profession, requiring cogitation first and foremost. On the other hand, as Michael White and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction ...”

“... add up to, what your aunt’s position in the world means. You could (and do) know that your young friend lacks culture, needs to broaden her horizon by travel. You could (and later do) know that she is ill. You could (and do) know that you yourself are ill. You could (and nearly everybody in the book does) know a particular fact or set of facts, a ...”

“... no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend quotes Michael Collins, who had fought in 1916 and three years later became president of the IRB Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship ...”

“... other selections from his working drafts. Yours Presently, the new volume of letters edited by Michael Seth Stewart, shows Wieners cutting across various groups in American avant-garde writing.‘A homosexual,’ Wieners wrote, ‘since he has been a stigma or outcast freak for so long, does not [usually] have a chance to meditate upon himself, even as a ...”

“... to have been participants or contemporary observers, or at least infants, in 1956. Except for Michael Korda’s lively memory of an Oxford undergraduate jaunt, they are historically serious and not only recollect but analyse emotion in tranquillity. Victor Sebestyen’s Twelve Days is well documented, based on up to date knowledge, and vividly ...”

“... a ‘sickly haze of pot smoke’. The fact that hippies are – like the superannuated Neil in The Young Ones – no longer the force they were does not pacify Holbrook. The poison is still coursing deep in England’s veins. McInerney (who was five years old in 1960) is the leading connoisseur with Bret Easton Ellis (who was not born in 1960) of a Nineties ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”

“... For a hero, Alderman Roberts may be lacking in style. ‘A cautious, thrifty fellow’ is how Hugo Young describes him and it’s easy to tell he isn’t impressed. But Alfred Roberts was an imposing figure in Grantham and his businesses worked at a time when a great many failed. What we chiefly know of his wife, the elusive Beatrice, is that her daughter ...”

“... Although precocious in that there are poems here which must have been written when Mahon was as young as 20 or 21, he looks as if he has been compensating for a lack of productivity by going over earlier work once again. Form and style in contemporary poetry are of course, highly contentious matters. There are celebrated poets who appear to have no idea ...”

“... Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood* there is a photograph of him as a little boy young enough to be in a frock, which was probably among the photographs he happened to look at through an old stereoscope, surprising himself into saying what a dear little fellow he had been. Quite astonishingly, it has the same lift of the head and the same ...”

“... their now abandoned ages’. The novel starts out, as I have said, with the shocking death of a young woman in the arms of her would-be lover. They have had dinner, have gone to bed and begun to undress, the woman just gets sick and dies among the foreplay. The child with the aeroplane above his head is asleep in another room. The lover, our narrator, tries ...”

“... Yemenis begging or selling anything they can at traffic lights has shot up, and groups of kids and young men hang around the streets or play football in any available space till midnight. (The space where a month ago teenagers kicked up so much thick dust in their game that they magically vanished into it like phantoms is now a lake.) Very little street ...”