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“... men lounging on street corners, Saturday-night fights, the number of barefoot children, how many young women drank in the local (the women in Southwark, we learn, ‘live on fried fish and four ale’, a mild beer sold at fourpence a quart). They populated their notebooks with vignettes of dock labourers, organ grinders, costers and ...”

“... forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a confirmatory miracle. She is imprisoned by the authorities in a convent. Gabriel becomes a ...”

“... continually remind us that Aids is ‘the gay disease’, no government education programmes for young people have been aimed at the gay audience in either country. It is said that brochures about Aids had to be smuggled into England from America in diplomatic pouches, so that they would not be confiscated as pornography. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ...”

“... grandparenting authority, the weight of ‘Mom-ism’ and ‘bossism’. He contrasts the plea in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – ‘I just can’t take hold, Mom, I can’t take hold of some kind of a life’ – with rip-roaring frontier folk material: ‘Raised in the backwoods, suckled by a polar bear, nine rows of jaw teeth, a double coat of ...”

“... fully comprehend. In the course of his narrative, Ottey comments on acts of personal kindness by Arthur Scargill; for him, the NUM President represents ‘a strange mixture of ruthlessness and sensitivity’. A similar sense of contradiction informs Crick’s critical yet not hostile study. The second edition has appeared only two months after the first ...”

“... Western Eyes, another novel that proved too much for Garnett. He once remarked admiringly of the young Arnold Bennett that ‘the most interesting thing about him is the strange amalgam he presents of commercial man pure and simple, and author’. But he had to deal with less adaptable authors, and he did so with skill and endless enthusiasm. His review of ...”

“... those who endure? Tomlinson’s ‘Up at La Serra’ dramatises the restricting circumstances of a young Italian poet called Paolo Bertolani,                 who had no more to offer than a sheaf of verse          in the style of Quasimodo. Bertolani has since achieved a style of his own; his most recent volume, Seina, is written in ...”

“... the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law reform, whether or not Brougham was ...”

“... just merits the attention of a critical-biographer – as well write a book on Walter Legge or Arthur Gelb. Since the Lamberts as a dynasty do not have the special cultural force of the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists or even the Auden Group, we are left with the supposition that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and ...”

“... is related to his not being a Modernist, his not being willing to ‘go all the way’ with his young mentor Pound. A further charge against him is that he wrote prose versions of his poems and then worked them up ‘into an arrangement of images, lines and rhythms’. The word ‘poem’ is here slyly avoided because such practices seem to show that Yeats ...”

“... of the isolated outsider. Praising his performance in Sands of Iwo Jima, General Douglas Mac Arthur (whose words had opened and closed John Wayne’s Bataan/Corregidor film, They Were Expendable), told him in front of the American Legion: ‘You represent the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself.’ So saturated with realism ...”

“... his pleasure. This, of course, was a question, and an invitation, calculated to appeal to those young enough, or bold enough, to have confidence in their possibilities for pleasure. Pater assumed, at least in his writing, that pleasure and sensation – not to mention the peculiar – were morally good. So when The Renaissance was published in 1873 it was a ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... other than in written notes. George was now next in line to the throne after his father, but the young duke and duchess of York soon found that royal powerlessness began at home. It took them years to rescue their eldest sons from the clutches of a sadistic nanny who cut short the boys’ meetings with their parents by administering cruel pinches. For all ...”