“... enjoyed a better public image than the Army during the last century and could be choosy in the young men it recruited. Were they such a danger to nice girls – or indeed to nice boys? The purpose of McKee’s Sober Men and True is, in the author’s words, to discover ‘what lies behind the stereotype of the globe-trotting adventurer’ with his ...”

“... Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness. At the other side of the table, the poet W.S. Graham is holding forth. He sits bolt upright, stabbing the air with the fingers of one hand; it looks as though an electric shock is passing through his ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... in response to male beauty, whether the speaker is Michelangelo in old age rhapsodising over the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de Cavalieri (‘And never have I burned and frozen/More than I have for you,/Messer Tommaso’), or the Sybil recalling her affair with Apollo (‘The shadowy body, the bare breast,/And dusk like nakedness and dew like ...”

“... Over the past year evidence has been emerging that the Japanese kidnapped more than 200,000 young women into sex slavery during their occupation of East Asia. Those so enslaved were termed ‘comfort women’, about 80 per cent of whom were Korean. Some were as young as 12, hauled out of their schools, often under a quota system, and carted off to army barracks and outposts all the way from Manchuria to the South Pacific ...”

“... in Burma and the Far East. They had titles like Beware of women, My seven daughters are after young boys, and Money hard to get but easy to spend. Like the home movies, which are in many ways their successors, they had no artistic pretensions, but were concerned only to reach the widest possible audience. They were churned out at high speed and quickly ...”

“... the masters and who the prentices? Davie quotes Canto 80: ‘For “prodigies” (“Mr Binyon’s young prodigies”) surely we ought to read “protégés”.’ But we shouldn’t delete ‘prodigies’: to lose the pun would be to lose the lugubrious implication that, in this day and age and art, a protégé would be a prodigy. Davie is obliged to ...”

“... In​ 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 ...”

“... of female society), those who play professional football do not: they are still overwhelmingly young workingclass men. Which brings us to Arsenal. To the extent that any individual club historically stands for this culture (for better and worse) it is Arsenal: no other club has had such continuous membership of whatever has been at the time the senior ...”

“... coalition’, ‘citizens of nowhere’) has been flung about like confetti. Some characters (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt) have kept reappearing in different costumes; others (Gavin Williamson) played cameos which, in retrospect, seem scarcely real.One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according ...”

“... Romanisation. The policy didn’t go far enough, however, to satisfy the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Founded in 1927, the Legion advocated a spiritually reborn, fully Romanian nation. Religious fervour and support for the Orthodox Church were a crucial part of its message. Violence was also essential. The Legion’s paramilitary branch, appropriately ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... over and over: obedience bitch, limit bitch, postgraduate bitch, this magnificent young bitch from Venice, this famous bitch from America.As a televised spectacle, though, Crufts is essentially comprehensible, organised around familiar rules. The presenters are the same ones who do the Olympics. The agility competitions work along similar ...”

“... futile’. He was what is now known as an abuser. He derived sexual pleasure from causing pain to young boys, especially by smacking their bare buttocks. All the boys at School House, Shrewsbury, knew of this abuse. The identities of Trench’s special victims were also well known. Peel quotes the then headmaster of Shrewsbury, Jack Peterson, describing the ...”

“... smitten with the rackety self-destruction of Zevon’s life (terrified of doctors, dying all too young), and cherishes the howling poetry of his lyrics. The Q whom Specktor kissed had once been involved with Zevon, and Specktor asked her: ‘Did you ever forgive him?’ She looks at him and ponders, like a Tuesday Weld close-up: ‘I never thought of it that ...”