“... And – I can see him still – I saw him start in stark terror as he heard my steps. How can the young today understand that kind of atmosphere? I love talking to the students who come here, although, yes, they do ask difficult questions. But that is only right. One boy asked me recently why I didn’t just take off my uniform, throw away my weapons. He is ...”

“... and interior design erupted across the country. ‘Everything must now be Egyptian,’ Robert Southey grumbled. ‘The ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung around with mummies, and with the long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed.’ But nobody ...”

“... his run, we hardly realised how discouraged we were; and his appeal is warmest and widest with young voters. A large reason for this is his realistic emphasis on the coming catastrophe of planetary climate disruption, an issue on which, thanks to his courage and tenacity, he stands alone among living American politicians. But in other ways too, Sanders ...”

“... make the allusion plain: their columns open out into great branches. The idea goes both ways. Robert Frost wrote of his forest of ‘young fir balsams like a place/Where houses all are churches and have spires’. As god is to man, Friedrich seems to say, so man is to nature: we are the ones who shape it, who isolate ...”

“... of religious truths to a dispersed public audience from the emotional intimacy dramatised in Young’s Night Thoughts. (The ‘Mr Fairly’ with whom Fanny Burney had what is for Guest a paradigmatic conversation about Young at Court in the 1780s was Col. Stephen Digby, the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain.) It is a tribute ...”

“... and especially little by comparison with the achievements of German philologists such as Ernst Robert Curtius. English Classicists are inclined to regard anything later than Silver Age Latin as beneath their notice, thus perpetuating the prejudices of Renaissance scholars (who could at least claim to have read some of the works they rejected). British ...”

“... asked: ‘What are you up to at Eishken?’ ‘Probably drinking too much,’ replied one of the young bloods. Nicolson knows that for well-off people to own parts of the Highlands is invidious. At the start of his book he retails the remarks of a man who came up to him in Macleod’s Bar in Tarbert, on Harris, and said: ‘Well, you’re a sackful a shite ...”

“... owned up to the habit, ‘although women’s bedrooms are surely warmer now than in Chris’s young day.’ ‘Maybe using a word such as voyeurism is unkind’ – it isn’t – ‘but there is an element of titillation … Chris is regularly seized on by her (male) creator and displayed to the male gaze.’The first and most famous time Chris takes her ...”

“... Esmond splashed out on the celebrated Peal’s bespoke brogues for his newly arrived young Italian wife; she was to have the best of English classic design, sturdier by far than a glass slipper, but as clear an expression of his hopes for his bride and his own status. Ilia realised the seriousness of the gift as the Peal family fitter, wearing a ...”

“... a stranger to same-sex animus. Her first play, The Children’s Hour (1934), about a malicious young girl who accuses two female teachers at her boarding school of conducting a lesbian relationship, is often taken retroactively as a political parable – an attack on those in the McCarthy period who ‘named names’ – yet the heart of the drama lies in ...”

“... across the more effectively for being underplayed. If, for example, there’s more going on in the young James’s obsession with aeronautical engineering than a boyish interest in jet fighters, the memoir doesn’t say. James describes his early experience of bereavement as giving him a certain self-protective coldness, an unwillingness to get too close to ...”

“... flank, with a derringer bulging in his pocket, is a detective called Pinkerton. The hulking young bodyguard with two conspicuous guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new President has ‘snuck in like some old ...”

“... a Talk of the Town assignment.Her first New Yorker piece was published in September 1974. In it, a young woman called Jamaica tells the reporter ‘there are several things you ought to know’ about the West Indian American Day Carnival in Brooklyn. She speeds through the singers and spoofs, the men dressed as women and the competing costumes, to her central ...”

“... Henry VI and end with his father, Henry V: this provides a pleasant climax, with the triumphant young monarch who brought his country great rewards in French lands. But the contorted sequence also says that those lands have already been lost by his weak son, Henry VI. This is a climax with its own inherent irony of history in it. There would have been ...”

“... the plantation in Beloved, the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bus in Robert Olen Butler’s Mr Spaceman all function as metaphors for the creative writing workshop.) McGurl also provides a smart and useful typology of ‘programme’ fiction (defined as the prose work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main ...”