“... matters between the writing of the two books. Some identifications remain: in 1970 as in 1964, the young man addressed in the Sonnets is the Earl of Southampton, not, as some still think, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben ...”

“... a golden-haired British gossip columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on himself to remedy her ...”

“... as many of the Moon Men, and a few other Apollo astronauts, as were willing to talk to him, though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity ...”

“... Spinkwell Mills, now Sprinkwell Mills (the need for the extra ‘r’ is a mystery), mostly to young professionals working in Leeds. And the beds are everywhere. On the other side of the ring-road, as if squaring up to Machell’s, there is the enormous redbrick expanse of Highgate Beds: Sleeping Comfort for Everybody. Along Bradford Road and Huddersfield ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in ...”

“... mosque in Manama. Some insight into Jackson’s life in the Middle East was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”