“... the present selection is full of the kind of youth-mongering that appears to slide naturally into young-fogeyism. You won’t find David and Nikos smoking the hard stuff with Mick and Keith. Plante is living out the fantasy of being a Jamesian personality in Europe and would be more likely to swoon at the sight of Frances Partridge than, say, Jimi Hendrix. We ...”

“... were smiling and waving frantically. I wasn’t entirely separated from my family: my brother Andrew, three years older than me, had been admitted to the hospital a few days after me. He had been called back from his school in Dublin when I was diagnosed and Claud met him at Cork railway station. ‘I really thought that all might be well up to the very ...”

“... on postwar newsreels about the rosy future awaiting the industrial population in the New Towns, or Young and Willmott’s jeremiad of the 1950s that the working families of the East End sent out to pasture were going to pieces, class percolates every pronouncement. Bruegmann does a service in reminding us of that. Sometimes he oversimplifies. He tends to ...”

“... that, he had not yet visited this country. His notions about its burial customs drew heavily on Young’s Night Thoughts and Gray’s Elegy, poems then honoured in Italy. That Foscolo himself should end up in an English churchyard would have seemed absurd in 1807. Yet the seed that led him to an impoverished death in Chiswick had already germinated. Foscolo ...”

“... swamp at the bottom. The destruction of footballing equipment was beyond the pale: we were too young for Barlinnie Prison, so we got banned to Home Economics instead and were soon the untouchable kings of eggs Mornay. My father gave up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a Protestant. But there was always my Uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic ...”

“... on it was the Ho-o-den, a tiny Japanese temple built by Japanese craftsmen. It entranced the young Frank Lloyd Wright and set him imagining buildings of simple space and candid materials, worlds away from the Great Court. The main response, however, was exhilaration at an exemplary grandeur. Testimony to the spell of 1893 comes from many visitors. None ...”

“... When​ I was young it was possible to feel you’d made it as a writer simply by getting a phone call from one of four editors. When it came to ambition, very few of the writers I knew really gave a fuck about being in Who’s Who, being named an honorary fellow or having one of the queen’s gongs, or a million quid advance ...”

“... When policemen first started to look ridiculously young, I can’t say it bothered me (besides, it’s good for them to be younger – fitter, keener, less cynical). I found the problem came when airlines began employing pilots whose voices hadn’t yet broken. There you are, huddled in your seat, trembly with fear and booze, and instead of being greeted by unflappable, grey-haired Captain MacIntyre, noted survivor, you get the reassurances of someone who graduated only last week from Lego to a 747 cockpit simulator ...”

“... on there’ – she pointed to the bedroom television; it was on with no sound – ‘about a young couple who spent a fortune on a bed and breakfast and it was all just ants. The sink was all ants and under the bed. You don’t want to go all the way to Spain for nothing but ants. You might as well just stop here if all you want is ants. The poor ...”

“... Berets’. The puzzle of what these games do to – or reflect in – the mental habits of their young players has been a subject of fearsome debate in several American universities and in several British courts. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have devised something they call P300 Response, a way of measuring the emotional impact of what ...”

“... are nearly 70 oils by Alice Neel, mainly portraits. There is also a very good film by her grandson Andrew Neel about her work and about the Neel family. It includes photographs and clips in which she looks like the model for a Norman Rockwell grandmother: grey hair pulled back, plump, smiling, wearing glasses, and pretty. To a degree she was all that that ...”

“... Here at last it is, seven years after Urry’s death, edited from drafts by his former colleague Andrew Butcher. The text runs to less than a hundred pages, but there are ample appendices and source-notes, and anyway these hundred pages of dense documentary detail are worth a thousand of theorising. Our historical knowledge of Elizabethan writers like ...”

“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

“... In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock ...”

“... we’d all have a long enough wait once we were dead. ‘Look at that,’ he said of a pair of young men climbing over the barrier to cross further along. ‘Oi! They want stringing up.’‘They used to do that around here,’ I informed him.‘Bring ’em back,’ he said. ‘Gallows, you say? I’ve a few candidates for you. Believe me: the big crime ...”