“... of rhetorical questions and ‘who can knows’. Things brighten for the reader as soon as the young Edwin Lutyens appears. The collaboration between architect and gardener was central to both careers and Sally Festing adds to the growing perception that, at least to begin with, Lutyens owed more to his ‘Aunt Bumps’ than has sometimes been ...”

“... Dandyish in dress, affected in bearing, snobbish in choice of acquaintance, he was the sort of young person who admired H.L. Mencken for the wrong reasons. He seems also to have been interested in impressing a ghastly-sounding Mama, though she would have been less delighted to learn of his amateur homoerotics than of his easy resort to conventional ...”

“... The year is 1920. Young Denis in Crome Yellow is asked by persistent Mary Bracegirdle which contemporary poets he likes best. The reply comes instantly: ‘Blight, Mildew and Smut’. Mary is taken aback, disbelieving, tries desperately to change what she has heard. Perhaps Denis had really said: ‘Squire, Binyon and Shanks’, ‘Childe, Blunden and Earp’, even ‘Abercrombie, Drink-water and Rabindranath Tagore’? But she knows it is not so: Blight, Mildew and Smut were for Denis the poets of the decade ...”

“... Banks, who was then guiding Kew towards its glorious future, as a floating conservatory to carry young breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies, there to provide cheap food for the African slaves. The ship, the voyage and the appointment were all unusual. Bligh’s father was a minor customs official; the boy did not really go to sea until he was ...”

“... lives and defined personalities in his. At the very outset he demonstrates this skill. There is Edward Parry, son of a cultivated and fashionable doctor in Bath – well-educated, intelligent, pious – a team-player very quick to use his charm and his connections to his own advantage, but also courageous and steadfast. There is John Ross, Parry’s ...”

“... 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 ...”