“... production of Twelfth Night reads in ‘good old Granville-Barker’: ‘Feste, I feel, is not a young man … There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”

“... bolted Hollywood to run off with Roberto Rossellini, leaving her husband (a Swedish doctor), her young daughter and her place as the world’s most successful and virtuous film star. It couldn’t, could it? she pleads winsomely. Certainly many of the elements in the Bergman-Rossellini drama are as dated as the home permanent. The grande affaire, the world ...”

“... in what he calls the ‘family drama’, particularly in that phase of the family drama where young people are pitted against their parents. Such stories are concerned, in fact, with growing up: ‘the emerging adult and his or her efforts to break out of the family circle and establish a permanent relationship with a peer’. The greater part of the book ...”

“... girls look less mad than trapped; they could be acting the part of one of Dickens’s wild, angry young women. Forbidden and shocking images proliferated. Pornographers found photography a lucrative medium (although there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album ...”

“... ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the characteristics of the best Victorian verse: the vivid and disturbing pictures, the rich organ music ...”

“... by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped Brigham Young build a temple that still stands. Young sent Miles and his son, Miles P., to St George, Utah, where they built a tabernacle and a temple. Young commanded Miles P. to take more than one ...”

“... was rung up some years ago by a researcher working on Hugh Dalton’s diaries to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow ...”

“... Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini is an extended obeisance performed by a young Englishman before some marble panels in an Italian church. The panels were carved in the 1450s, mostly by a Florentine called Agostino di Duccio, who was working in Rimini for the local warlord. Three dozen illustrations punctuate Stokes’s reissued text of 1934 ...”

“... who had hated Johnson from the moment he set eyes on him ten years earlier, when Bobby was a young staffer and LBJ was lording it over the Senate. Bobby desperately tried to persuade his brother that it was a mistake to bring a man he considered a monster into the fold. When that failed he went to Johnson himself to try to talk him out of it. All he ...”

“... has been central to debates about the relations between intellectuals and the state since before young Werther got sorrowful; possibly ever since the play was adapted as Der bestrafte Brudermord soon after its first appearance. Certainly once Shakespeare was naturalised by the Schlegel-Tieck translation and others in the early 1800s as ‘the third German ...”

“... the spirit of the red carpet’. Dresses like these are no longer bought for marriageable young fillies to wear to country-house parties, in the old-fashioned, coming-out way. The contemporary ballgown is more often built to be displayed on a celebrity body in the harsh light of the global media marketplace (which perhaps explains why this show of ...”

“... or early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... The distressing fact of her wifedom is one of the central threads in Heroines: how will this young woman make sense of being a wife, and what sort of wife is she? And can she both be a wife and what she most longs to be – an artist, a writer, someone who speaks to the world and is heard? It may seem like an old-fashioned problem (of course she ...”