“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... of Rubio’s nomination had now been accepted as an article of faith by the pundits. Here was a young, slick, good-looking reactionary whose parents had fled Cuba. The themes of anti-communism, which somehow continue to animate US politics, were his birthright. Once the field was cleared of lesser lights like Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly ...”

“... her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed’. He had survived Charterhouse school, which he hated. He got through by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he ...”

“... a job with the British-run Egyptian postal service, and Nelly Grün, a cultured and attractive young woman from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews. Nelly was visiting her uncle as a reward for graduating from high school, ‘still a fairly unusual achievement for girls in central Europe’, her son would write more than seventy years later, using his ...”

“... in only four years: ‘The bodies, now mumia, had been those of slaves and other dead persons, young and old, male and female, which he had indiscriminately collected.’ In 1546 the German physician Leonhard Fuchs still regarded this new form of mummy as disreputable, complaining of ‘the gory matter of cadavers received evidently from the gallows or ...”

“... for life among the haute bourgeoisie in prewar Germany and Swiss sanatoria, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless for possible events during Brandt’s schooldays. Where there is no proof, there is supposition. For example: ‘There is ample evidence that Brandt suffered a psychic wound in his school days, something so hurtful that it affected every area of ...”

“... novels, but the mood has grown nastier. Brenda hooks up with Beaver, an indifferent and snobbish young man who is universally deplored and whom even Brenda recognises as second-rate, and demands a divorce. The beau monde is charmed by so fantastic a romance, and a broken Tony seeks to be obliging; but after various humiliations he puts his foot down and ...”

“... to Blackpool to play poker. You wouldn’t have got me there for any other reason. When I was young, my family used to take day trips to Lancashire’s beach resorts. Each of them – Fleetwood, Cleveleys, Lytham and Morecambe – was desolate in its own way, but none provoked so many tears as Blackpool, all that giddy anticipation disappointed by damp ...”

“... a passing fashion, a too-easily domesticated bag of tricks, and an inexplicable temptation for the young. 7. Contemporary criticism is mainly a product of universities at the metropolitan centres of empire in Europe and the United States. It is the dominant form of ‘advanced’ literary culture at the centre of empire. By contrast, literary culture at the ...”

“... when I asked him which of the other artforms novel-writing was most like.) Lennon captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano. He doesn’t quite explain Mailer’s pugilistic kind of heroism, but he portrays ...”

“... trying to meet Germany half-way towards its legitimate aspirations. Both the middle-aged and the young between the two wars had been pulled emotionally towards Germany. The veterans had formed lively ‘no more war’ associations with their old opponents in the Kaiser’s army; the unsophisticated young enjoyed Bavarian ...”

“... generation’. (His great-grandfather had gone to the Cape Colony in South Africa in 1842.) The young John Pocock moved in 1927 to New Zealand, where his father, Lewis, who had taken a degree in classics after his wartime service, became a professor at Canterbury University College. Pocock’s mother, Antoinette Le Gros, was born in the Channel Islands, the ...”

“... idiom, he was essentially a verist. In fact, his whole quarrel with the operatic stage of his young manhood, which he knew all too well from galley years as chorus master and musical director in more or less decrepit opera houses from Würzburg to Riga, was precisely that it was weighed down by convention and artifice (I’ve always loved his description ...”

“... Persia’s Asia Minor satrapies that he’d initiated was taken over, and vastly expanded, by his young and inexperienced son Alexander. It is all too easy to see why the new Great King, Darius III (a cousin of Artaxerxes III and, like more than one of his predecessors, on the throne as the result of a coup), fatally underestimated the threat of the ...”

“... the butcher or the cattle.’ Why are there no counterparts to Twilight’s ethical vampire, Edward Cullen? Why are there no vegetarian zombies? (Well, undoubtedly there are some somewhere, but if so, they’ve never caught on.) Many zombies don’t merely want food, they want flesh – in the earlier films, human flesh, and lately any kind of ...”