“... subjects) with his stubbly, slightly stooping distrust of the camera. The curled and freckled Mr Michael Rooney, who in his smock and kerchief seems to look at us straight out of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph from the 1860s. The long-necked poise of Mrs Barbara Hyslop, the intimate textures of dark hair and fine wool. Much like the portrait sitters for ...”

“... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...”

“... suddenly they are made to join the daily grind of 21st-century pedagogy. As the parent of young children, I wasn’t alone in feeling perturbed by the relentlessness of the daily maths and literacy classes, and by the rote manner in which English – or literacy, rather – is taught, with sentences treated like exotic gadgets to be operated with the ...”

“... after a few years’ employment in order to have a child, are actually exceeded by cases of young men who move on, after about the same length of service, in search of roads that might lead more quickly to the top. That brings me to my second excuse for breaking my vow. In some overwhelmingly masculine fields, which have not reached even the ...”

“... creeps’). Those easily offended should on no account read the following quote: This was not a young man making love to a girl. This was the meeting of twin souls. The light covering of flesh was so transmuted with ecstasy that early passion became a heavenly embrace of white fiery flame. There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not ...”

“... Mike Tyson in July, is a regular visitor to the boxing gym on the upper floor, where the athletic young men – mostly black and Hispanic – spar in a raised ring, thrash oblong leather bags, pump metal, skip rope, and stalk their own images in three or four large mirrors, with a fury that must be reducing the life of the building still further. To stand at ...”

“... was tormented by envy of her daughter’s happiness.’ A playboy attempts to abduct a respectable young girl just for the hell of it: he is wittily and bleakly said be an instance of the male Magdalene, to be forgiven in much the same terms as his Biblical female counterpart – ‘for she loved much; and everything will be forgiven him, for he had much ...”

“... an officer called Odoacer killed his former colleague Orestes in battle and deposed Orestes’ young son, made emperor barely a year before. The boy was sent into retirement, lucky to be alive, and the poignant irony of his name – Romulus Augustulus, ‘the little emperor’ – has proved impossible for posterity to resist: 476, the year he was ...”

“... same period made up the New Poems of 1907 and 1908. Forget the horrid and ubiquitous Letters to a Young Poet, forget Duino, forget The Sonnets to Orpheus. They are for me his greatest poems, and Malte his greatest book.The New Poems are written under the shadow of ‘mon grand ami Auguste Rodin’, to whom the second (1908) volume was dedicated: Rilke had ...”

“... But he is in danger of doing so. Single, and sexually active, he takes part with the other young people of the district in the courtship and mating rituals which lead, willingly or not, to the married state in which Gilbert, like Aaron, is likely to feel blocked and negated. The upshot of the first part of the novel is that Gilbert Noon is very nearly ...”

“... measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of young black men, along with the mass incarceration of poor blacks in US prisons, have become the symbol of a national disgrace that is no more hidden than the concealed weapons that far too many Americans carry, and which is a symptom of the same faith in ...”

“... I – we know that it’s this.’) Often competitive, they are frequently keen on working with young women, who can be pleasing company whom they don’t feel the need to destroy. At least not intentionally. After hearing my thoughts on the reading, Weinstein declared me bright and said he needed help with a movie he was making. It needed a new ...”

“... its Free Statehood: on 2 December 1921 he crossed the Irish Sea from Holyhead on the Cambria – Michael Collins and Erskine Childers, on their way back from the Treaty negotiations in London, were making the same journey. The Cambria collided with a schooner (killing three men) and when Ford arrived in Galway he discovered his ancestral home was in ...”

“... Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual desire. He is on the search for a lost late Giovanni Bellini (Gentile’s more famous brother). This genre of fiction depends on imagining almost possible pictures, and you ...”

“... that gives his prose its precision. These letters and the diaries are Maitland’s chief source. Michael Asher’s fine Thesiger: A Biography (1994) chiefly relied on conversations with Thesiger and those who had known him, supplemented by the published works. Now, Maitland’s painstaking use and critical correlation of the Thesiger papers allows him to ...”