“... around them. Both Corbyn and Sanders have an impressive archive, appearing in photographs as young men being manhandled by police as they protested against racial segregation. It isn’t just their words that persuade people they offer a break from the status quo, their biographies do too. They have accrued the political equivalent of rich credit ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... anatomised Isherwood with a typically cold eye: Stripped, I am no Adonis. My body looks fairly young because it is soft and not heavily muscled. My shoulders are narrow, and my hips too big. Nevertheless, as long as I hold myself well and remain full-face to the audience, my figure looks passably good – or, at least, quite cosy to lie on. When I turn ...”

“... 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 Etienne-Jules Marey and Lucien Bull, and the popular adventures of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough. In another light Painlevé is a photographic modernist, attending to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street. On ...”

“... is happening here, and what sort of film is this? Let’s start with those first few minutes. A young woman stares at us, or rather slightly away from us, perhaps at someone offscreen. She has a smooth oval face, large eyes, a mildly sulky gaze, she’s not revealing any secrets. She’s very young, more a girl than a ...”

“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...”

“... had been available to workers and non-workers alike. He claimed that these benefits had encouraged young men to withdraw from the labour market, young women to become pregnant outside marriage and young fathers to decline to marry the mothers of their babies. In the black ghettos, ...”

“... When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under him, there is ‘around him nothing but the still earth and the stubble ...”

“... a yet higher level. Should we then be either surprised or morally self-assured at the photos of young men and women in uniform leering at or torturing naked prisoners in an overcrowded prison in Iraq? As more and more evidence comes out of similar episodes in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Mosul, Basra and so on, it does begin to be clear that abusive ...”

“... Iwo Jima campaign, Flags of Our Fathers (2006). An old man is remembering his participation as a young marine in raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi, a moment immortalised in another famous photograph, taken by Joe Rosenthal, perhaps the most reproduced photograph in American history. Late in his life, though, it is not Rosenthal’s 1945 ...”

“... the heroine of her first novel, The Unlit Lamp, and the character to whom these words refer. The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were ‘aggressively intelligent ... not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who did things well ... women who counted and who would go on counting ... They ...”

“... warm yet terrifying, the sound of childbirth, I always think, as heard by the baby. When I was young, though – I dimly remember – the Cybermen did seem quite scary, with their blank, square faces and cruel, insatiable appetites for human whatever-it-was. But actually, most of that mystery came not from their appearance, but from their name. Back ...”

“... least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty in her yellow dress. Gore talked, imitated, made ...”

“... its themes with time-consuming thoroughness and deliberation.Meanwhile, in Paris, a self-effacing young man of 22 – one of whose pieces of advice to composers would be to ‘keep it short’ – dashed off three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked ...”