“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to straighten it out: it represents the consciously exercised preference of a lifetime. One of his young favourites, Harry Stafford, who was 18 when he and Whitman began to share a close attachment and, whenever opportunity offered, the same bed, reported to Traubel years later that when Whitman stayed at the Stafford home, ‘he would make a great mess of his ...”

“... at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will ...”

“... habit, pausing (presumably) to change his shirt, was to drive into town and take a succession of young women he referred to as ‘dancers’. Would not dwelling on the author’s writing habits be seen as mere gossip and triviality? The question was gravely discussed as the film was edited. Wheldon declared that it was relevant to the consideration of ...”

“... There was a time when sugar-pulling parties were a cover for courtship, with strong-muscled young men – this was no task for wimps – showing off before female eyes. In America such events were called candy-pulls, and one would not be vastly surprised to hear that they still flourish. It goes without saying that Mason is nostalgic, as who is not, for ...”

“... choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the ...”

“... were real enough. He was a rude, uneducated colonial; he was a man between generations, too young to be a war poet, and too old to belong to the Auden Gang that would follow; and he was uncertain of his own sexual identity (his first sexual experiences were evidently homosexual, though he married in 1922). So he began his poetic career as an ...”

“... Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something else: the coloured wheels of psilocybin-induced visions ...”

“... I mean He can pass with me in the meaning and we still not see ourselves. young people and their sweet names falling, almost too many of these. Some of these sonnet-like poems have a deftly suggested ‘inside’ to them, as in a Mannerist picture. Ashbery’s long poem ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ dealt in great apparent ...”