“... he settles. Sexual desire, in particular, is considered strange and regressive. He complains to a young woman, whom he finds quite attractive, that the local diet of bread and bean paste seems self-mortifying. She reproves his unbridled appetites, then startles him by asking how a wish ‘to grip me tight and push part of your body into me’ comports with ...”

“... I did not respond to the call, but it reminded me of someone who did: Pavlik Morozov, the heroic young Soviet denouncer of the early 1930s whose legend is the subject of Catriona Kelly’s new book. Unfortunately in Pavlik’s case the suspicious person he dobbed in was his own father, and angry relatives took revenge by murdering him. Pavlik won a lasting ...”

“... I once met a young priest in the west of Ireland who told me that he was to be sent on the missions the following day. ‘Where are you being posted?’ I asked. ‘Birmingham,’ he replied. The Irish Catholic church has always scattered its clergy abroad, and there has been a lay branch of this pastoral exodus as well – nurses, for example ...”

“... as Afterwards. The journal’s editorial includes me too, as one of the pony-tailed generation of young women, clones of Francoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot, who showed no interest in ‘women’s civic rights’. When I first met Betty Miller in the early Fifties she was becoming quite famous as the author of a good biography of ...”

“... about his verse. While working sporadically at the Bar, he came to know a cluster of thoughtful young women who called themselves ‘the Grecians’ and were dubbed ‘the Settee’ by the father of one of them, Mary Coleridge, ‘because they just sat and sat’. Together with Mary, Newbolt set about writing a historical thriller called The Debt of ...”

“... More recently, the case has attracted attention from historians of illicit literature such as Robert Darnton, interested in explaining the success of Thérèse philosophe, and from historians of medicine fascinated by Cadière’s visions and trances. An article on it even appeared in the journal Epilepsy and Behaviour. Scientists, ignoring the long ...”

“... rifleman. ‘Much too tall for a rifleman, his mother cried.’ This transformation of old into young, whether it concerns young soldiers in the Forties or young girls in the Fifties, is taken for granted almost without exception. A recurring feature of the various contributions in ...”

“... grip the arm of his chair, the duty of the male was to provide. For Elizabeth Baker, an incisive young woman who had trained as a teacher, the male’s job was to ‘make something’ of himself. The domestic inappropriateness of this view was quickly overshadowed by the economic hopelessness in which she and her brood were suddenly engulfed. A diabetic ...”

“... when all-night parties, partner-swapping, drugs and drink characterised the lives of his wild young friends, Ashton was too ambitious to be led far astray. He began to cultivate influential people: Ashley Dukes (Rambert’s husband), the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, and, most important of all, the ...”

“... telling him that they had been reading his books and admired them above all others. The young Miss Sontag was shocked that a great writer should be disturbed by two schoolchildren; and shocked again when the great writer acknowledged their letter with an invitation to tea. It seemed ‘grotesque’, she said, that Mann should waste his time meeting ...”

“... that scaling peaks ‘contributed about as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weathercocks of all the cathedral spires of the United Kingdom’. Such was the strength of mid-Victorian feeling against Alpinism that, in the words of one of its devotees, ‘a sort of palsy fell on the ...”

“... Jan Gay​ was born Helen Reitman in Leipzig in 1902. She came out as a lesbian in young adulthood, studied under the German sexologist Magnus Hirshfield, started a nudist colony with her partner, Zhenya, and eventually collected interviews with hundreds of queer women in European cities, in the hope that writing up their sexual histories would help make lesbianism more accepted ...”

“... nothing can be a real cool hand.’ He earns the respect of his fellow inmates (including a young Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by ...”

“... one of its captains embarking for the Gold Coast in 1651, and also ‘buy for us 15 or 20 young lusty negers of about 15 years of age, bring them home with you to London.’ Among the aristocracy and gentry, it had become fashionable to be waited on by dark-skinned boys and girls. A year after he admired Mingo’s dancing, Pepys noted in passing that ...”

“... in many forms. In Abinger Harvest E.M. Forster had the idea of doing a kind of anonymous life of a young man in Regency London, quoting Keats’s letters and describing his hopes and fears and his family and financial troubles, but not mentioning him by name. It brought the actual Keats, before the legend began, very close. Barnard’s treatment has something ...”