“... Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t ...”

“... I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her heels. ‘You could go to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s ...”

“... and reassuringly familiar to its audience, each episode, according to its recent presenter Kirsty Young, ‘a well-tethered hammock’ cradling itself ‘around each highly individual guest’.For decades the famous and worthy, or would-be worthy, have queued up to appear on it. On his death in 1965, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s heir presumptive for ...”

“... is the winning side. Nowhere on either wall is space found for Walter Bagehot (1826-77). Yet G.M. Young, that hallowed chronicler of the Victorian age, came quite firmly to the conclusion that if you were looking for the Greatest Victorian, Bagehot was your man. There was no one else ‘whose influence, passing from one fit mind to another, could ...”

“... spread to François’s neighbourhood in the 13th arrondissement, but one day he finds a group of young Muslim men blocking the campus entrance, waiting to escort their burqa-clad ‘sisters’. François used to take comfort in the saying, ‘après moi, le déluge.’ Now he’s not sure he’ll die in time to avoid it. In the first round of elections, the ...”

“... encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... been radically different. But what about that street ballad from the Napoleonic wars in which a young woman laments the loss of her lover, pressganged to serve on the Victory, and in which social protest does not prevent her acclaiming ‘the noble lord, bold Nelson’? What about the popular success of Shakespeare’s history plays, or the fame of ‘the ...”

“... says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House ...”

“... the US telephone company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man’s voice informed him that he had planted bombs in several switching systems known as 5ESSs. ‘They’re set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country – it’s a sort of competition, a security test.’ On 15 January 1990 ...”

“... There’s also something in us that knows pigs can’t fly. Treglown paints a portrait of a young man delirious with his own promise. As a wounded RAF war hero (who actually crashed his plane through inexperience on a routine flight) he was sent to Washington and New York to gossip and gather intelligence about American intentions towards the Allies. He ...”

“... they complement and resist each other, and they do so, crucially, in a story that focuses on a young woman, an artist in her early twenties, whose defining characteristic is that she is impossible to pin down. She is known only as Reno, after her hometown. It’s 1977, and she’s left Nevada – a ‘hard-hat-wearing, dump-truck-driving’ kind of place ...”

“... die Toten’ – ‘Blessed are the dead’), and the intensely plangent five-part Lamentations of Robert White, who died of plague in 1574, at the age of 36, along with his entire family.9 March. Europe is closing down. Flights are being cancelled. Two LRB editors have plans to go to New York, where the situation is just beginning to kick off. Sam decides to ...”

“... Dr Leete tells Julian West as he stirs from his slumbers. ‘Your appearance is that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily condition seems not too greatly different from that of one just roused from a somewhat long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day of September in the year 2000, and you have slept exactly 113 years, three ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bad admissions risks, coming from obscure colleges with undistinguished records when they were young. Why can’t PhDs in the humanities assume they have more choices than teaching at universities or robbing banks? There are some notable recent success stories, from Newt Gingrich, with a PhD in history, to ...”