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“... His kinsmen are playthings in his hand: the devoted and stupid are exposed as German agents, the young and gallant are betrayed and imprisoned in Germany or face a firing-squad. He works towards a German victory but for a higher end – to bring about revolution. At some time this paragon of the Establishment suffered a sudden conversion to Bolshevism. It ...”

“... in 1896 and won by the Glasgow firm of Honeyman & Keppie. The drawings were made by a brilliant young assistant, a policeman’s son from Dennistoun who was born Charles R. McIntosh, but he was not at first given any credit for the design. The plan is admirably clear, with tall north-facing studios placed along spinal corridors. The huge windows that light ...”

“... that they had anything to do with the music industry … pejoratively, the press started to call young groups ‘haircut bands’.Not the least important of these self-conscious funsters was a band from Beckenham called Haircut 100, who specialised in perky, blond-highlighted pop. Many of their fans had the ‘wedge’, a hairdo invented by Trevor ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... 1919. He was only 29 years old, still dazzling, animal-like, an Aschenbach vision on the Lido, a young man who could jump and pause in the air: but he began to spend all night in his studio scribbling the same things over and over, the doodlings of the incrementally mad. The thing he drew was eyes. Sometimes, in his little exercise books, he might draw ...”

“... His first sexual fantasy was of lying naked on a battlefield. Such are the images that can speed a young person into prose, living out the reality of a martyred mother and a dead father. His first attempt at authorship was ‘The History of My Friends’, a tiny manuscript he dictated to his mother. It taught him, Bucknell writes, that ‘friendship could be ...”

“... BC, but its later role was similar to that of Latin in the Middle Ages. A school text quoted by Andrew George in his new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh makes a sardonic point about Sumerian and its importance: The door monitor said, ‘Why did you go out             without my say-so?’ and he beat me. The water monitor said, ‘Why did ...”

“... preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got ...”

“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... rise to an executive level where they only boss around those who write – and particularly about Andrew Knight, the former Economist editor brought in as chief executive of the Telegraph by Conrad Black. Part of the deal was that Hastings should replace Deedes as editor, a changing of the guard that led Thatcher to throw a party for him at Number Ten. Knight ...”

“... It’s awe-inspiring yet one has to say One’s heart goes out still to the Student Wei. Young Wei it was who, raised as a Red Guard, Looked back on his achievements with remorse. With Mao set to cash in his Party card Deng and the boys announced a change of course. The Student Wei invited ten years hard Saying they’d got the cart before the ...”

“... of a more rhapsodical and isolated kind. Thomas felt lucky to get a smell of printer’s ink so young, but his success proved to be a mixed blessing. It instantly typecast him as ‘a country writer’, and discouraged attempts he might otherwise have made to conform more closely to his father’s model. When he went from St Paul’s to Oxford in 1897 ...”

“... Elizabeth Smart was browsing one day between the wars in the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social hopes, Smart came to lean against those London bookshelves as if they alone contained all the answers. That day, she drew her finger over a line of volumes, took one down and read the poems where she stood, deciding by the last page that the author was the man she was put on earth to marry ...”

“... lesser literary attributes, self-pity, when I think of some of the things we were exposed to so young. But it was quite common. The most popular picture round our way – every family had one, usually above a three-bar fire – was a commercial painting called The Weeping Boy. There were several versions of it, but they all showed a child in distress. I ...”

“... of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.) But what the novel takes for granted is the young hero’s military status. Ernie didn’t. Every other letter through the latter half of 1917 into 1918 is filled with hopes of a secondment, but the truth is he missed most of the war and made a great deal of the skirmish that cut his legs. (No bones were ...”