“... a tally of planks, posts and bricks. I wasn’t the only one either. There were other intelligent young men with notebooks with me. We were indispensable. The hotel was to be five storeys high. It was the tallest building anywhere within ten miles. White, tall, lonely, it stuck out over the world. Our old people, who didn’t think much of progress, were ...”

“... the red hat which I’d always thought by Carpaccio, but isn’t now, and also the Portrait of a Young Man by Baldassare Estense. I don’t care for Cosimo Tura, whom I usually find a sinister painter, the flesh and aspect of the living no much different from that of the dead; still, I like his funny little Pietà with the Virgin looking at the wounds in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... chimes regularly, it is all very regular, even the drunks are regular in their drunkenness. The young people regularly long for London or hanker after Hollywood, finding reality in soap operas, perhaps not seeing the soap opera in their own realities. In the reality of Josie Keenan, abused by her father, raised in a clay-cold, loveless, nun-fusty ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”