“... everything else Cath’s moral conscience would like to stand up for. And she doesn’t like the young female investment bankers either: they had ‘perfected – indeed, made into an art form – the kind of hand gestures that blinded you with their large diamond rings’. This wasn’t what her generation fought for. Cath strikes up an office friendship ...”

“... Ginsberg). Travel is another instance, and when Koch writes about his experiences in Sweden as a young man, his amusing and unassuming manner turns towards the world: The only thing I could say in Swedish Was ‘Yog talar endast svenska’ Which meant I speak only Swedish, whereas I thought it meant I DON’T speak Swedish. So the ...”

“... the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister blackmailed because of his affair with a young man, had once seemed merely melodramatic – and hard to reconcile with more usual images of Sixties permissiveness. Now I can see why it is described as ‘crusading’. Today Old Compton Street in Soho is lined with gay bars, and in the Sixties, too, gay ...”

“... in Husbandry in Early Modern England sets out their life pattern and prospects. Service was, for young folk, they hoped, only a period in their lives before they would be promoted to tenancy. In the agriculture of the day many tasks were held as suitable for specific age groups. After working at a boy’s task an adolescent would graduate to harder manual ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer and, more recently, Sir Alan Sugar. She likes artists, especially the erstwhile Young British Artists, and above all, Tracey Emin, who knows how to lay on a juicy spread: the offerings for their first encounter in 2001 included a used condom left on a sofa, Tracey’s 80-year-old dad in a nearby pub, a dream about ‘how she was a sparrow ...”

“... sort may fall.’ The tract before the court, he went on, ‘would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character’. Here, couched in Victorian prose, was the erection test.Victorian legislators were careful, when draining the bathwater, to keep the baby ...”

“... save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ... The usual self-consciousness of young men, especially as he threw in, gratuitously, the information that he descends from Dean, Rector, Bishop, Von Ranke etc etc, only in order to say that he despises them. I tried, perhaps, to curry favour, as my weakness is. L was adamant. Then we were ...”

“... as wilful – on the contrary, the misbehavers had their counterparts in the horde of priggish young who set about eroding the turpitude of wicked adults, as in the magazine story of 1827 called ‘The Pious Girl and her Swearing Father’: judging by her clinging attitude (she is illustrated with both arms clasped around his neck), he had plenty to swear ...”

“... composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of ...”

“... it is at once over-heated and un-serious, and has a sort of neighing ring to it, as of a clash of young geldings. At his best, Paul Johnson’s writing rises above this – for example, his picture of how the 1983 Labour Manifesto came to be written: ‘The absurd policy document ... which reads as though it was written by a covey of demented social workers ...”

“... of a photo he sent her around 1929. ‘Did you want to cover up your chin?’ Most important, the young Himmler was not well liked. He did not impress his fellow fraternity students at the Technical University in Munich, who repeatedly refused, despite his importuning, to elect him Fuchsmajor, an office assigned to a respected senior student entrusting him ...”

“... When John Curtis left Penguin for Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1957 (leaving the vacancy that the young Tom Maschler would fill), he was told two things. At Weidenfeld and Nicolson, authority was not devolved via committee: this was George Weidenfeld’s show. Second, Curtis was told, the aim of the house was to ‘open a window to Europe and the world’. So ...”

“... There are​ few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses. Or take Ingres’s earlier but equally celebrated portrayal of the Baronne de Rothschild, a woman Heinrich Heine compared to an angel ...”

“... physicians still recount these diagnostic exercises in order to rebuke or silence enthusiastic young medical scientists who babble incoherently about the place of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in a country practice. The discovery and marketing of insulin put it for the first time within the power of the profession to restore to something like ...”

“... is probably unique in his lack of conventional qualifications for the job. George Lansbury and Michael Foot, the former Labour leaders he most resembles, had been cabinet ministers; Foot was Callaghan’s deputy in the 1976-79 government. Corbyn’s lack of conventional qualifications, however, is the reason he won. He was in a sense an anti-candidate: he ...”