“... race, rallying to Britannia in her hour of need. What kind of men were they? Predominantly single, young, eager, and without technical skills. Most were channelled into the Infantry, where they could be taught the rudiments of trench warfare in a few weeks. A few of them, however, already possessed the most crucial skill of such a war: the ability to ...”

“... book is not so much ‘death, fear, hunger’, as the effects of a unique kind of confinement on a young middle-class Englishman of his generation – namely, the experience of a prisoner-of-war camp. He originally published it in 1947 as a novel and has now reissued it as an ‘autobiographical memoir’, unchanged except for a brief explanatory preface. It ...”

“... Or rather, it resolves them by adopting a pose of wry detachment. Looking back from 1936 at that young and callow infantry officer, the author can allow himself the luxury of mockery. Yet in 1917 matters had been very different. What the Diaries record is the muddle of a man who chose an identity and then found that he could not function within it. Infantry ...”

“... can be reduced to a projection. This is in effect the position chosen by Lee Congdon in The Young Lukacs: ‘In his earliest years, he despaired; regarding alienation as the condition humaine, he espoused a tragic conception of life. Only when, out of the crucible of a great personal tragedy, he came to believe that alienation might be overcome, did he ...”

“... with his thin paw & swiftly absorbing 3 or 4 large lumps of cake in succession. At home he looks young and rompish at the meeting, at Hunts meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow ...”

“... and his persecution of Buddhists and favouritism towards his fellow Catholics provoked rage. As a young officer assigned to the lower Mekong Delta, Holbrooke seemed to have more than a little in common with Alden Pyle, the ruthless, idealistic protagonist of The Quiet American. Holbrooke himself would later wonder ‘what possible qualifications’ such ...”

“... or nurture – the pelican (not the first in Rego’s work) pierces its breast to feed its young – but the dynamic is sexual. The girl and bird are posed at an angle. Jane’s eyes are closed and her mouth stretched wide; she is needy, greedy, pained or ecstatic, the embrace a nightmare of assault or a dream of sustenance, perhaps salvation. Jane is ...”

“... off on a campaign that helpfully defined exactly how much a proposal should cost. One ad showed a young woman with her chin in her hand, big blue eyes and big shiny diamond all sparkling for the camera. The text underneath said: ‘You can’t look at Jane and tell me she’s not worth two months’ salary. I mean just look at her.’ The two months rule is ...”

“... thing, they’re not what they were: he uses a wheelchair to get about, and a smiling, shy-faced young man called Junior carries him when necessary. For another, his writing has never been fully at home in the tropics. Les Murray, a comparably prolific user of English under a hot sun, made his poem ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’ into a love song ...”

“... of 17, and his apartheid-era fiction often dwells on the horror of being a sensitive, usually gay young man in a culture of rough sports, red meat and white supremacism. ‘We’re men here, not girls,’ an officer snarls during the narrator’s military service in The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), and the narrator, who can’t catch a ball, feels a ...”

“... Tessimond’s poems uninspiring (‘impression of yr. work neutral’), but he did furnish the young poet with the addresses of a number of magazines in America and Europe, and a few years later This Quarter, based in Paris, published ‘A painting by Seurat’, which was among the batch submitted by Tessimond to il miglior fabbro for comment. On the back ...”

“... funeral procession to Brookwood Crematorium required three special trains and was attended by many young men who were to be heard much of in the next century, notably Gandhi and Lloyd George. Lord Queensberry was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh ...”

“... the work of composition’. Initially at least, theatre wasn’t his main interest: the ambitious young provincial was determined to establish himself as a literary poet, for whom print and court patronage would be the key to success. Catering for the popular tastes of playhouse audiences was something he, like many of his playwright contemporaries, might ...”

“... by a factor of 40 between 1994 and 2002. In August 2002, a cover of Time magazine read: ‘Young and Bipolar – Once called manic depression, the disorder afflicted adults. Now it’s striking kids. Why?’ The article listed a series of ‘warning signs’ for parents: ‘poor handwriting’, ‘complains of being bored’, ‘is very ...”

“... Bucky’s great-aunt Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalist and feminist.)† Though near-sighted, young Bucky loved to sail and invented a new kind of oar. His childhood hero was Robin Hood, perhaps because his father’s death had impoverished the family. When he reached Harvard, he was snubbed by his wealthier classmates, cut classes, squandered his ...”