“... of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot and say, ‘Oh, we are being difficult today, Lord!’, the current mistress, Marie-Edmée Escarra, later dismissed for drink, and a lethargic, affable, fat Lord ...”

“... worked as an editor on the monumental Tudor Church Music. Plain, frail, shortsighted, not quite young any more and, for the first time in her life, rather poor, she set out to enjoy herself. ‘I am sure that to be fearless is the first requisite for a woman: everything else that is good will grow naturally out of that.’ In her first novel, Lolly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did live, worked hard and happily, and got engaged. Then he died. His fiancée visited the hospital to thank ...”

“... appears to give Liston a better part in the off-beat title story of his new, third collection. A young amateur boxer hoping to go forward to the Chicago Golden Gloves competition finds himself frustrated by the truculence of his stepfather and the indifference of his mother to almost everything but the application of the green paste of her nightly face ...”

“... to them. This tactic of self-subsuming has worked for other writers, but in the hands of the young Merrill, in ‘The Broken Bowl’ for example, it produces verse that is impacted and evasive: The splinters rainbowing ruin on the floor Cut structures in the air, Mark off, like eyes or compasses, a face Of mathematic fixity, spotlight Within whose ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant – and sometimes damaging – publicity, mainly ...”

“... to others. And they stand in contrast to another group of beliefs held on the whole by the young – concerning the special Scottish contribution to bawdy songs, drunken conviviality, early class consciousness, hardiness and poverty. Items from both sets of belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of most of these books. Derick ...”

“... which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in ...”

“... Now it had moved inside. Just after the Accords were signed, my law firm employed a bright young man to do the cleaning. He was overqualified, but had lost his job in Israel when the West Bank was closed off. One day he broke an antique pot that I kept on the shelf behind my desk. I angrily explained to him the pot’s archaeological significance. The ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... included the 40-year-old Fuller, ‘in a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old son. All three died when they were swept overboard in a storm after an agonising 12-hour wait for rescue when their ship foundered on a sand bar within sight of shore at ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... and illustrated popular accounts of current science that are food and drink for the enquiring young. A dozen topics are considered here that would never have been included in such a book fifteen years ago: the limits to growth, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, the fuel and agriculture crisis of tropical countries, the significance of ...”