“... towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who ...”

“... Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory where young Alfred grew up: the alcoholism, madness and opium addiction. Under this family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment ...”

“... Yeats summed up his generation’s complaint: ‘The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – “When he should have been broken-hearted,” said Verlaine, “he had many reminiscences” – the political eloquence of Swinburne, the ...”

“... and One Nights. ‘It’s better than The Thief of Bagdad.’ He reads Graham Greene, offers his young literary judgments. Proust and Balzac are the ‘2 greatest novelists in the French language’; Daudet shows ‘a mixture of glibness and sometimes vulgarity yet there’s talent there.’ Much later, turning down a proposal for a film of Proust’s Swann ...”

“... question. ‘He’ is Wolcott Balestier – brother of Kipling’s future wife Carrie – who died young of typhoid and is Seymour-Smith’s candidate as Kipling’s ‘lover’. Suppose that, knowing he was dying and having nothing more to lose, he told Carrie ... of the nature of Kipling’s friendship for him? Of the nature of their relationship? Of how ...”

“... binding acts nowadays as a warning signal to look more closely at the contents of his morocco.’ Robert Riviere outforged Thomas Wise by at least a hundred to one. The only other distinction to be made between them is in the nebulous sphere of intention. The binder did not actively intend to deceive, merely to repair (although perusal of the stock and ...”

“... erratic and intellectually precocious. Bored at school, he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the ...”

“... posted to the Territorial Army I was sent to another WOSB and passed easily, but by then I was a young gentleman from Balliol. Vinen, who is very interested in class, stresses that the army had a firmly binary structure into which grammar school boys did not fit easily. There were officers and there were other ranks, with nothing in between; warrant officers ...”

“... in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain less than has been supposed. Young Barack was always cared for, and from the age of ten, his education saw a passage with apparent ease through elite institutions. The Punahou school in Hawaii is one of the top preparatory schools in the United States, Occidental College in Southern ...”

“... and Montblanc fountain pens. At the same time, she makes sure that the narrator – a wide-eyed young man called Richard Papen out of a nowhere town in California – is able to persuade us that the susceptibility is all his own. As a character, Richard isn’t wholly convincing. For a straight bloke of 19 or 20 he’s a little too blasé about fending off ...”

“... A detective is chatting to a young local at a crime scene, the body a few feet away, all the technicians and policemen going about their business. What has happened, the boy says, is that the dead man, who has been coming every Friday to a craps game on the street and snatching all the money as soon as the pot grew large enough for him, got killed because one of the other players ran out of patience ...”

“... of age, have never been near a woman.’ He tells us about a girl he kissed and then lost as a young man (as happens with Lydia and Arvid in The Serious Game), about his difficulties believing the facts of life when he was told them as a boy. He passes whores in the street, he is sent an intimidating bunch of roses by the bold Eva Mertens (again, something ...”

“... when she eats it, the flame of love for Ivan flares in her heart. Ugrešić’s Ivan is Mevlo, a young masseur at the beauty farm, he is a Bosnian orphan with a heart of gold, who has suffered from a permanent erection ever since a bomb exploded beside him in Sarajevo. He will find the egg, and there will be a beautiful future for him too ...”

“... in 1966, was giving way to the more sensitive city of Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.But this was largely an illusion. Davis and Wiener demonstrate again and again that in less bucolic parts of the city the harsh, segregated LA lived on. Twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon, in the hotter, smoggier flatlands, the African American ghetto of ...”

“... the bishops of Exeter, filling it with paintings and tapestries. There were some brutal evictions. Robert Cecil used ‘strong-arm tactics’ to acquire land from the bishop of Durham and hastily evicted the sitting tenant, Walter Raleigh. Arundel House, the most gorgeous palace of them all, was acquired by Alethea Howard and her husband, the earl of ...”