“... the treatment Owen received at hospitals in France and Hampshire, and then at Craiglockhart, where Arthur Brock implemented a regime that he called ‘ergotherapy’, a kind of work-cure, to which the poet responded well, not least because it involved writing poems on themes set by Brock, such as the battle between Hercules and Antaeus: the result was a fine ...”

“... was thrilling, she told Juliano in the documentary he made about her, Arna’s Children, to be a young woman ‘driving people from place to place, and nobody could stop you’. She would remain a Palmachnik – tough-talking, sometimes arrogant, always brutally direct – and she passed the style on to Juliano. The keffiyeh she wore in Jenin, which ...”

“... many of them college kids of draft age, and his instinctive respect and affection for the young, often Southern, and distinctly non-collegiate soldiers of the same age, blocking the way. ‘Average pals and buddies,’ Mailer calls them, ‘“real” American teenagers’, They bring to mind his own days as a soldier in World War Two, when he was ...”

“... and the amount of influence which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same ...”

“... on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the next morning relieved – nose bleeding, ears roaring ...”

“... explain why Obama won relatively comfortably). Obama had huge majorities among ethnic minorities, young people, single people, gay people. Old people, married people, people with children voted for Romney. On the upbeat account, this is all fine. Obama won among the demographics that are growing; Romney among the demographics that are shrinking. The ...”

“... is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such ...”

“... birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were also important, particularly in India, where Enron’s massively expensive Dabhol electricity generating plant, the first such privately owned project in the Subcontinent, was mired in controversy, and ...”

“... element of stoic indifference.’People leave places for different reasons. In Ramsay’s poem, a young man is leaving both his West Highland home and his girl behind, perhaps because he intends to join the British army or navy. In Nicol’s painting, the couple are migrants reluctantly quitting the old world for the new, perhaps because their landlord has ...”

“... made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s versions that ‘their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries’; but then reading any great literature, as Carey says in the encomium with which he closes his autobiography, ‘makes you see that ordinary things are ...”

“... and patiently explain to him that, at the Casino Theater at 39th and Broadway, there were three young Jewish fellows running around the stage shouting to an indifferent world that they were all Napoleon?’ But the world in the postwar years was not indifferent to the brothers, even if Groucho was the only one prudent enough to consolidate his gains. A ...”

“... of Kubrick raising his voice – but the occasion is the more remarkable for that. He was a young director, still in his twenties, Douglas a top-billed actor in his prime, but Kubrick asserted his authority for everyone to hear. His identification with his films was arbitrary, complete and brooked no exception.The final scene of Paths of Glory gave ...”

“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a ...”

“... on national security affairs that I know’. What was going on? When Kissinger told his friend Arthur Schlesinger that he found Quayle to be ‘well-informed and intelligent’, Schlesinger took it to mean ‘that Quayle listens reverently to Henry and that Henry thinks Quayle may be president someday’. When that dream died, he moved on to George ...”