“... of living. But now he was suddenly eager to live, which meant running into the arms of the young. He found two new models: Sylvette David, a young woman with a blonde ponytail, and Paule de Lazerme, a black-haired ‘queen bee’. A different Gilot emerged too, stick thin, like ...”

“... of his own, Gente en la Playa, going to the beach on Sundays to record, in neo-realist fashion, a young film-maker’s impressions. (He doesn’t mention whether or not he had seen Emmer’s famous 1950 feature Domenica d’Agosto.) His activity began to annoy: using the simple materials to hand, particularly available light only, the ...”

“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”

“... most famous, most performed work, Miss Julie. Strindberg and his family, including three young children, were staying in a dilapidated mansion not far from the Danish coast, chaotically run by a crazed countess and her feckless steward (her secret half-brother and lover), who became Strindberg’s Julie and her lover, the valet Jean. Prideaux says ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... jockey, George Woolf, his regular jockey, Red Pollard, having broken his leg galloping a wild young racehorse as a favour to a friend. Seabiscuit is well aware of the cultural baggage the horse was carrying with him: the ‘little horse’ drew more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, Hitler or Mussolini; ‘Seabiscuit Day’ at Santa Anita brought ...”

“... then nineteen or twenty, told her mother that she was writing a novel and that it was about a young man’s adventures in the South of France, her mother had apparently said: ‘I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’ (‘Billi’ was what her family called the ...”

“... of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent. If a bright young director survives this malarkey and makes a second great hit, in Hollywood he is no longer a genius but a prophet. His relationship with reality is then likely to be beyond talking about, and unlike the successful novelist, say, or the smart ...”

“... of England that they arrived with were sadly wide of the mark; curious distillations in which David Niven-like aristocrats dispensed fairness and tolerance in a Dickensian landscape. ‘All I knew about England was what I read,’ says Teddy Peiro, who was born in Argentina: ‘I was very fond of the famous detective, Derek Lawson, and his ...”

“... clergyman’s wife,’ Quaife tells us, quoting one of his court cases, ‘saw the young man try to put his hand up her daughter’s dress as they sat at table,’ and there was recrimination. The young man boasted: ‘I’ll fuck thee and thy daughter before I go home… I have fucked ten old women of this ...”

“... Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian ...”

“... 12 rounds with the black limousines, trying to cross the road, so I was happy to encounter the young models willing to show me inside. The gargoyle count at Paris fashion events is always high and that is part of the entertainment. Before I’d even found my seat, I’d spotted Stella McCartney in a blue net veil talking to Suzy Menkes, Claudia Schiffer ...”

“... Exchequer, and Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade – and, down on the Bristol waterfront, a young carter called Ernest Bevin was getting himself elected chairman of a newly established carmen’s branch of the Dockers’ Union? The question gains added point when joined to the now fashionable question whether the current political dominance of Margaret ...”

“... Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished middle age to young women to come and inspect his valuable etchings (alias the manuscripts of his famous novels) may have been as pardonable as it was pathetic, given the Strindbergean state of his marriage. But the unguarded remark he made to his only daughter Jill is a ...”

“... which seem to cancel themselves out – not prose and not a poem. John Ashbery has called this young Californian ‘a stunning new voice in American poetry’. It is difficult to agree. Clary spills mild thoughts in hazy paragraphs. Terrified of the literal, she speaks with a confident evasiveness. The result is strange, puffy gossip. There is no way to ...”