“... a Picture Post feature entitled ‘Big City Loneliness’, a state exacerbated on Sundays, was the young Katharine Whitehorn, described by Nead as ‘a journalist who went on to work for Picture Post’, which is a bizarrely emaciated description of one of the most celebrated journalists of her era. The reliance on Picture Post as a point of reference is both ...”

“... people were speechless and sputtered with emotion to see me there. And not only old friends but young people whom I had never seen before.’ The modesty, surprise and sense of a home ‘made strange’ are almost those of a young boy, or an old man whose legend is his parallel life. These glimpses of Renoir’s presence ...”

“... time to give the encounter at Holy Cross a thought. However, later that week I came across a pale young man with a moustache, and wondered where I knew him from. In a surreal moment of social embarrassment, I was at an IRA funeral with him and for a moment, I just couldn’t place him. What made it doubly awkward was that I couldn’t really avoid him. He was ...”

“... years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was 12-year-old Anthony. Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community – Nashoba – in backwoods Tennessee, founded by her ...”

“... thrust his other hand out for alms and the shopkeeper spat neatly into it. Everyone laughed. The young man jerked and flicked his hand, trying to shake off the phlegm; then he made a grimace which was meant to be a smile, and I felt terribly ashamed. The Russian, further spat on and kicked, pushes his way out of the crowd and lies down in the dust. He gets ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... He sent this to the newly appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday. Faraday replied immediately: Pickersgill’s report had ‘greatly excited’ his curiosity, not least because ‘the meteor or whatever else it might be’ had been witnessed by ‘men of philosophical & correct habits of observation’. Would ...”

“... Charles Sorley must have been the most brilliant of all the young poets who died in the First World War. Yet ‘brilliant’, with its flashy, brittle connotations, isn’t the right word. He was undeniably clever, and forthright, but also good-humoured and modest, often very funny, shrewd and serious, but never (the young man’s vice) priggish ...”

“... years have also seen a dramatic rise in reported cases of anorexia and bulimia, especially among young women in the US, may wish to believe that the ever-canny actress and entrepreneur will once more set a trend. But a cautionary note is in order. As Susan Bordo suggests in Unbearable Weight, her recent study of our collective fixation on thinness ...”

“... President returning from his morning jog in August 1993 accompanied by a troupe of bodyguards and young staffers. In the blunt words of a pseudonymous commentator on one of the e-mail chat-sites which cling barnacle-like to the Drudge Report, it showed a post-run young female ‘jiggling her tits’ and ...”

“... close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally ...”

“... have taken part. The interwar generation of British writers (those, like Auden and Isherwood, too young to serve in the First World War) suffered from this. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, their main impetus for engaging with it, at the front or in print, was anti-Fascism. But there was also a sense of atonement: a belated opportunity to stand up and be ...”

“... efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious ...”

“... myself,’ she wrote in one of the essays in Slouching towards Bethlehem. Her subject was Comrade Michael Laski, who ran a splinter group of Stalinists in Los Angeles, where Didion interviewed him in 1967. He was threatened from every direction. Dealing with dread, Didion believed, invited risky measures of self-protection like alcohol, heroin, sex and ...”

“... A scene from a concert: on stage, a young Jewish-American folk singer/ songwriter, accompanied only by his own guitar and the harmonica around his neck, with a forceful, nasal voice and impeccable comic timing, is singing – or half-reciting, half-improvising – a talking blues. The object of his satire is the paranoid and xenophobic response of some of his fellow Americans to the threat posed by a sinister and nebulous enemy from the other side of the world ...”