“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... enteric disorder in Mexico. ‘There is much to be said for enjoying ill-health when one is young,’ he says. ‘One learns not ... to take it too seriously’. Yet as he is handed on from host to host, you realise that there is more to him than his connections. Steven Runciman is enchanting company. The art of travel is, whenever possible, to repay ...”

“... like the one where my parents live, were lassoed by Hampshire North-West, which Sir George Young (Con, obviously) retained in 2001 with a swollen majority of 12,009. Ever decreasing turn-out probably didn’t help Hunter: Basingstoke’s citizens have followed the national trend of not bothering to vote, though they’ve always been slightly more ...”

“... Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known writers, and it’s ...”

“... to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare was an unmitigatedly boring and unhelpful witness. The young couple whose hand-fast betrothal he had personally conducted, deprived of the dowry about which he remained so irresponsibly vague, can’t have had a very high opinion of his gifts as a marriage-broker either. He wasn’t even consistent, forgetting the ...”

“... empire’, you begin to think he is just hankering for the old days and another life, when a young American – he was only 35 at the time – could have an archduke for a cousin, like the girl called Marie at the beginning of The Waste Land, and a whole set of memories to go with such aristocratic connections. There is a good deal of nonsense along ...”

“... process) ‘the mystical period’. Slowness runs a typically ferocious 18th-century story of a young man being exploited one night by a noblewoman (it’s called Point de lendemain or No Tomorrow) against a chaotic contemporary one where Vincent meets Julie, they get undressed (‘Take off your clothes!’) by a hotel swimming pool, he promises her ‘a ...”

“... of speech to literal life in a way that marks Peake’s art. In a French novel he would be the young man from the provinces, an avatar of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. He is a wonderful fictional creation because Peake’s strong sense of Steerpike’s evil and the damage he does – by the end of the second novel he has killed six people – is quite at odds ...”

“... something very much more – accept the fact that this may never be? And if there was once, when young, a romantic wish to die, and a courting of death, what then? Will there be guilt, and a dark attempt to shift the blame?’ These are not real questions. Long before we can dial through to Ontario and press our own special insights on the author, the ...”

“... He turns 25, then 54. ‘Until a short while ago he hadn’t changed much; you could say he was young.’ There are incidents, some trivial, some tragic, but none of them is part of the grand, unarriving story. The events include a spectacular false alarm, when some armed men are seen approaching. They are not Tartars, but members of a neighbouring country ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... world very different from any my aunt would have recognised. I saw a good deal of her while I was young because, during the war and then again after my parents divorced, I was largely brought up by my paternal grandparents in the wicked town of Maidenhead. I didn’t know it was wicked until later when I read the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick ...”