“... of always being cold.The burden of these illnesses is hard to overstate. At a time when even young children were expected to help support the family, the birth of a cretin could be a catastrophe. Through it all, there was the fear of what a birth might bring; the fear that it was their fault. This was an ancient evil, noted by Vitruvius and Pliny the ...”

“... Italian opera). Danon is an accountant and an ageing widower. His wife Nadia, once the beautiful young girl, has died of cancer. Their son, David-Rico, has taken off to India-Nepal-Thailand, as all young Israelis do, if you believe the fuss, as Oz seems to, about ‘migration’ in the ...”

“... early death at the age of 44. As a boy playing on Berkhamsted Common, Greene had cast himself as David Balfour, and as a novelist he can be thought to have given his own bleak twist to the kind of ‘adventure story’ with which Stevenson’s name was for so long associated. In 1949 he began to write a biography of Stevenson, abandoning it only when he ...”

“... His early forays into fiction, particularly Moi, un noir (1957), about the life of young migrants from Niger in Abidjan, had a formative influence on the leading figures of the Nouvelle Vague such as Truffaut and Godard. In 1960, he himself conducted Chronicle of a Summer, an investigation into the ‘Parisian tribe’, along with the ...”

“... not at all like Swann and even less like Proust himself. A literary parallel would be Stendhal’s young hero Lucien Leuwen, though it would be difficult to imagine him transposed into the English social scene. Duff Cooper had the same great capacity for enjoying life, which is not uncommon: much less common was his ability to do so in such a way that the ...”

“... David Peace’s first novel, Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), was set in West Yorkshire in the year of its title, and presented that time and place in apocalyptic terms. ‘These are violent bloody times, son,’ a senior policeman tells the narrator, a gauche young journalist investigating the disappearance of a series of girls ...”

“... a highly readable and scrupulously accurate account of Marlowe’s life in its historical context, David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004), which no new archival discoveries have rendered obsolete.* It is an even bigger difficulty that there is a similarly unsuperseded historically contextualised introduction to Marlowe’s literary ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”

“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... fundamental right. Recently, I have heard them voice similar views about the jailing in Austria of David Irving – the man who prided himself on having shaken more hands that shook hands with Hitler than anyone else in the world – for Holocaust denial. It seems that racists and Nazis are never far from the centre of concerns about free speech. In the ...”

“... new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is concerned with young people of the Dutch East Indies in the 1890s, almost choked with different roots – religions, races, cultures, classes – all sprouting wildly. The resemblances struck me when I started reading the Indonesian novel as an invigorating respite, after the ...”

“... was a deadly visitation. Then experience in rich countries changed. It almost seemed as if people, young people anyway, got sick only in order to be cured. As if medical skill needed volunteers on whom to exhibit its tricks. After the Second World War tuberculosis no longer killed a substantial proportion of its already decreasing number of victims. To see the ...”

“... the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a ...”

“... a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has recently been reformed by the Young Turks. In 1908 their revolution allowed the emergence of political parties, instituted elections and ordained a new pluralist order whereby non-Muslim subjects were elevated into full citizens, who might serve in the armed forces as officers of any ...”

“... always liked because it’s so unlike, uneasy, fierce and with me still at fifty looking quite young.He could be quite difficult, though I never found him so, and I always remember that in 1987, on the day Russell Harty was pilloried by the Sun for his patronage of rent boys, Snowdon rang and asked him to supper, a circumstance with which, had they ...”