“... a heavy shadow that dogs her like an obligation. In her novel Les Samouraïs (1990), her young alter ego is called ‘a bull-dozer’. We don’t have to go as far as that, even if it is said to be ‘the best of compliments’. Kristeva arrives at elegance, even brio, but only after cautious preparations, as if a plane were to need the length of ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... some of Davie’s most delicate poems concern quiet and all too ordinary emotional desperations. A young woman in Iowa lacks ‘the ease of heart’ to see what she might have seen if she had not been so brutalised by poverty, and such ease does not feel like a luxury, some lightweight adjunct to a life. In another poem an English woman can’t leave the ...”

“... Where Yarmouth bloaters grew,     Selling Tom-tits five a fardin     To unhappy young Leboo! No one, however, would actually want to claim that this provocatively sported walrus was a direct source for the better-known specimen that consorts with the Carpenter. One of the curious phenomena which we can be grateful to Malcolm’s book for ...”

“... film was first shot. After Bogart and Bacall were married, Hawks, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall and the young female scriptwriter Leigh Brackett wrote and improvised more. The result was to separate Vivian from her evil sister and create the happy marriage of Thirties screwball comedy and Forties hardboiled noir. ‘When you see the film of The Big ...”

“... sexual fantasy skits’. She played native girls from the Empire in love with dashing young Frenchmen – a role Baker and Pepito had anticipated in their novel, My Blood in Your Veins, where the heroine’s blood transfusions save a white man’s life. She would repeat it in her variant of Offenbach’s La Créole and in her films of 1933 and ...”

“... an amateur Jewish police force composed of local thugs, ‘the Jews’ very own deviants’, as young Philip puts it, sounding very much like his older self. When three Jews get killed in the skirmishing, ‘it wasn’t necessarily because they were Jews’ (‘though it didn’t hurt,’ Philip’s Uncle Monty adds). That ‘necessarily’, along with ...”

“... mine,’ Stephen Dedalus thinks while talking to an English priest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The language isn’t the priest’s and isn’t Stephen’s, but the priest talks as if he owned it and Stephen feels he never will. Neither, we may wish to recall, has any other language except those he has learned in school. There are 16 official ...”

“... line, a first-person narrative by the writer himself. The narrative recounts his meeting with the young woman who will become his typist. This structure continues for some twenty pages. Then the page splits into three and the typist gets her own first-person narrative. From now on the three modes occupy almost every page of the novel, although every now and ...”

“... in thinking that the rubric was extended to include the words ‘or traditional’. The formidable young McWilliam doesn’t seem to me to fit comfortably under either label. A Case of Knives was a dazzling, burnished, stilt-walking stylistic exercise, like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker ...”

“... description for A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen’s loosely autobiographical account of a not-so-young Russian-American graduate student’s ambivalent year in Putin’s Russia. The novel’s hero – also named Andrei – is similarly torn. From his home in New York he promises his older brother – who has suddenly fled to London after getting on the wrong ...”

“... Now that works such as Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (first published in 1963) and Michael Levey’s Painting at Court (1971) have made the social history of art respectable, it is becoming quite difficult to remember the time when it was virtually restricted, or abandoned, to a handful of Central European Marxist émigrés such as Frederick ...”

“... in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain less than has been supposed. Young Barack was always cared for, and from the age of ten, his education saw a passage with apparent ease through elite institutions. The Punahou school in Hawaii is one of the top preparatory schools in the United States, Occidental College in Southern ...”

“... of the Church having in this period a largely atavistic character. Many of the best-known young intellectuals of the period of the 1956 revolt, such as Kolakowski and the economists Brus and Lange, belonged to this ‘revisionist’ current. These intellectuals had been educated in the Stalinist school, but were seeking a democratisation of the ...”

“... if he does not take Communion when they go, she will suspect that he has been having sex with a young widow. Although he tries the confessional beforehand, he cannot receive absolution because he refuses to obey Father Rank’s instruction to steer clear of Helen Rolt. If he takes Communion in his state of mortal sin, then he will damn himself, but he goes ...”