“... 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 ...”

“... to be regularly published, she also corrected the rigidity of Sartre’s reactions. When Todd, a young conscript under orders to join his unit in North Africa, contemplated desertion rather than share in the repression of nationalist movements, Sartre automatically advised him to obey orders but to carry out ‘de l’agit-prop’ in the ranks. De Beauvoir ...”

“... on that age-old congeniality of feeling and purpose which brings writers, and particularly young ones, together. A cold wind blows through the world of the arts, where supply is eternally in excess of demand, and one finds shelter where one may. Nor am I recommending any variety of Noble Savagery or Doing-your-own-thing. The latter is a contemporary ...”

“... None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature – except Robert Aickmann (sic) who gets his name misspelled, and he is banished to the ghetto: ‘See ghost stories and horror’. Seabrook’s disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard, co-author of ...”

“... travelling west across the great plains towards the Rockies; unbeknown to most of them, a young and beautiful heiress kidnapped from a town in Louisiana has been secreted in their wagon-train, hidden in what Cooper calls a ‘pavilion’; the other members of the clan have been told the ‘pavilion’ houses some sort of beast they mustn’t go ...”

“... he sat through the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité and seven films by Robert Bresson. It was the summer I learned the word ‘austere’.My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something ...”

“... Ronald Reagan, about such then modish topics as supply-side economics and the evil empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display. Asked by a colleague, on his return, how the visit had really gone, Carrington replied: ‘Oh, very well indeed. She liked the ...”

“... It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.Boswell was plagued by venereal disease and thought his bouts were worse because ‘I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison ...”

“... Spenser and Sidney. Both poems include fulsome dedications to the Earl of Southampton, a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and ...”

“... his contemporary advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of an eye and a leg in battle on how to retain his mistress’s affection. John Debrett’s flagship was the Peerage, which rode the generations ...”