“... the many levels of darkness and violence in this ‘home’. In the meantime, though, he was a young writer in Dublin, gleefully attacking his elders. On Seán Ó Faoláin: ‘I have had no contact with him except through his work and it has always seemed phoney to me.’ On the novelist Kate O’Brien: ‘I find literary people bore me to almost the point ...”

“... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...”

“... Party cells in Addis Ababa before the revolution, and about the pre-revolutionary splits among the young Marxists). No less surprising is the failure to mention any of Professor Richard Pankhurst’s works, notably his Economic History of Ethiopia. A number of rather blatant prejudices stand in the way of accurate analysis and explanation. For ...”

“... believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the approval of the Palace and the Home Secretary, had appointed a working party of his own senior officers to review current policy and practice for the ...”

“... equality of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It ...”

“... in a girdered hive.(‘Let Me Measure My Prayer with Sleep’)Such lines exemplify something Michael Schmidt once identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that has ...”

“... herself. She knew that ‘superficial knowledge and flash’ were not enough when it came to her young lover Michael Bruce’s preparation for what she hoped would be a career in British politics. She excoriated travellers’ tales of the East that only scratched surfaces, including Lamartine’s celebrated Voyage en ...”

“... the publication of Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star (Leonardo Di Caprio) are about to make a film version of it, a remarkable achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its ...”

“... his farmworkers would take when his farm was invaded by Zanla ‘war vets’ – the majority young unemployed men being paid on a per diem basis by Zanu-PF. ‘There were 26 of them but they told me that another 170 were on the way. They said that we were foreigners and would have to go. I said they could stay on the farm if that’s what they ...”

“... of historic guilt with Kurtz. In the end it was the land not the people that attracted the young Coetzee. But the land was stolen; it was not his. His mother tongue was English, but then again, perhaps not, since it was an English spoken by Afrikaners. Asked whether he was Afrikaans, he complained that ‘Afrikaners would never accept him.’ Asking ...”

“... fifty years put together. The exception that proves the rule is Dickens, who became so famous so young that people carefully preserved the wonder-boy’s missives: as a result, the majestic Pilgrim Edition, in progress now for nearly a quarter of a century, is only half-way through his creative life. The letters of a writer like Hardy or Johnson, in which ...”

“... dealing with production and supply. Dalton himself, with an eye to party politics, recruited able young socialists like Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. The diaries reveal the many points of conflict between the career Civil Service and the outsiders. There were quarrels about honours: were the temporaries entitled to them? And there were differences over ...”

“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... on his intuition. In the Memoirs he tells us how an uncle in banking, having listened to the young Aron’s dissertation on the currency crisis, finally said to him: ‘Je t’écouterai quand tu parleras de philosophie; sur les finances, tu ne sais rien, tais-toi.’ He did not take the advice. He wrote, and spoke, extensively about economic ...”

“... terms. After the death of his friend Hendrik Andersen’s brother in 1902, James wrote to the young sculptor: ‘The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close & long, or do anything to make you rest on me, & feel my deep participation – this torments me, dearest boy, & makes me ache for you, & for myself.’ There ...”