“... have the scars to show for it’. He is doubtless thinking of his earlier novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), and two collections of stories, Unions (1911) and Three Women (1924). Perhaps also of his plays, The Enthusiasts (1921) and Vinzenz and the Girlfriend of Important Men (1924), and a great many articles and essays. He would like now to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... part because of the end of Russian influence. But ‘the street’ is volatile. Those millions of young men, city migrants, many with little behind them and less ahead, unemployed even when they have some training or a degree, and forming with their sisters a high percentage of the population of Arab societies, are a constant source of unease to ...”

“... quality in her so as to catch it on film. But Gardner, who had been obviously shy when she was young, was still secretly shy when older, and even oddly shy before the camera. As a result, although she always looked pretty, at first she was a wooden performer. She became an actor when she found a way of presenting herself on screen, the self she presented ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Davis is quite literal (‘my believing youth’), and the first Scott Moncrieff has ‘when I was young and had faith’.Then the Fall comes – another thing that happens in gardens. The old carriages are gone, and people are driving cars. No mythological horses – just, to take Proust literally again, ‘moustached mechanics’. The women have terrible ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he never ceased to milk his memory for flagrantly sentimental recollections. For the 1964 Election Michael Foot wrote a Bevanite hagiography of Wilson, which he quickly expunged from his own Who’s Who entry (the opposite of the Kinnock technique) when Wilson’s Government, despite the presence in high office of Crossman and Barbara Castle, proved a ...”

“... a revolution from the left is on the agenda at all in the coming two decades, Mr Scargill and his young miners will be the best place to turn for leadership and for the Red Guards. That seems to me to be the best case that can be advanced for the defence of the NUM leadership. It is not all a matter of pure advocacy: many of the points Scargill makes about ...”

“... now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters and Slater’s own editions of Dickens’s journalism. But Slater is a career Dickensian, not a popular ...”

“... Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began the first historical-critical edition of his works. In 1915, a year before he died at Verdun, Hellingrath delivered a lecture describing Hölderlin as ‘the most German of Germans’, whose luminous hymns confide their message ‘only to the select few’ and remain ‘perhaps never penetrable to non-Germans ...”