“... and friendship loyalties, and wholly negative. The case always cited was that of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who denounced his own father during collectivisation, whose example was recommended to generations of Soviet children.*In the course of my research on Soviet history, I became interested in Stalin’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early ...”

“... wittily indecorous. When, on a fishing trip with Nathanael West and S.J. Perelman, the writer Edward Paramore, a popular ladies’ man, hooked what Sayre’s father, Joel, described to her in a letter as an ‘eerie Will-Beebish object’, purplish and fronded. Perelman identified it as ‘a marine vulva’. As for the ‘athletic, activist’ drinking ...”

“... theory that creativity will flow if outside pressures are removed seems to work. Time is what the young need, and contact with their contemporaries as much as with great minds – which is just as well, because you have to have something pretty important to say to dare disturb one of the world’s great brains when it is thinking about the world’s deepest ...”

“... Seventy-four at the time, and three years from death, he probably said it to annoy the serious young dons in the serious new English departments, and he certainly succeeded. It pleased him not only to be a voice from the past, but a voice of almost youthful irresponsibility, dissent, blasphemy, iconoclasm. And it pleased him no doubt to dis-identify ...”

“... which he took to, thanks to Chinatown, the opaque glamour of whose cultural life was just what the young doctor would have ordered for himself – how right that the apprentice Exote should first have been turned in a sinological direction by the sight of Chinese life in its export version. In May 1903, Gauguin died, and three months later, Segalen’s ship ...”

“... whose teenage years had been overshadowed by the First World War. ‘We strain every nerve to keep young,’ Nicky says. ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ his fiancée replies. ‘It probably only means we shan’t live so long.’ The dialogue sets the underlying terrors bouncing off a brightly flippant surface, making no ...”

“... sightline of two passing nuns. But it’s all quite gloomy and solitary, as if she’s stuck in an Edward Hopper painting. The effect of reading about the lady is strange; you’re struck by the poignancy of your own mundane rituals, as if, all of a sudden, you were drunk. Brennan wanted to write ‘as though the camera had never been invented’. She’s a ...”

“... Saxe-Meiningen: but no more than Anne and George of Denmark could they keep their children alive. Edward Kent, as it turned out, won the race by getting a girl, Victoria, in 1818. The proud mother, Victoria, Duchess of Kent, was the widow of the late Prince of Leiningen – and the sister, it so happened, of Leopold of Coburg. What later became famous, or ...”

“... frequently seems ripe for the travel pages of Vogue. Carcanet has published a series of books by young poets gravitating towards the idea of travel. Of those under review, Grevel Lindop’s Tourists is the most transparently accomplished. Lucid of contour, with a syntax almost too elegiacally attuned to form, his work displays, even when not concerned with ...”

“... than ushering in a new one’, and this view is echoed by some other remarks quoted in the book. Young poets at poetry readings say that almost every other poet is ‘their contemporary’, but not Lowell. Like Colonel Shaw of For the Union Dead he is ‘out of bounds’ now, left behind like a museum exhibit, a period photograph, while Abstract ...”

“... fact – was her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild ...”

“... first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After the show, Taylor says: ‘They’re just AWFUL.’‘They ARE awful,’ agrees Brian. ‘But I also think they’re fabulous.’There’s a hint of steely camp in that ‘fabulous’ of ...”

“... memories, and cast them in epic form (Arthur Scargill’s first job, when he joined the Barnsley Young Communist League, was to be made ‘Ballads and Blues’ secretary). Aneurin Bevan, a glittering representative of the South Wales coalfield, and the most accomplished orator of his day, made the mining industry a vivid presence in the world of high ...”

“... on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but rather wished that ...”

“... in Syria is in the low hundreds. The figure may be exaggerated, but it is still likely enough that young men from the UK who fail to find martyrdom in Syria will return to fight at home. Syria is now host to two al-Qaida-related organisations: the al-Nusra Front and alongside it (and sometimes in competition with it) the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham ...”