“... by now he was a client too. Khrushchev became party leader in Ukraine in 1938, and recruited this young man – obedient, efficient and popular – to help reconstruct Soviet authority in a country traumatised and depopulated by the purges. Under this protection, Brezhnev rose rapidly. He became head of the local trade department, then Ukraine’s chief ...”

“... the normal world – but who wants to live there?’ He takes men and women he describes as ‘young, hungry and stupid’ and turns them into a howling, irresistible sales force, persuading investors to buy lousy stock the traders can dump once they have made a packet from the brief, illusory booms. DiCaprio describes the job as ‘selling garbage to ...”

“... that his near neighbours were two of the most socially committed architects of postwar Britain, David and Mary Medd, who lived in a house they designed and built for themselves in the 1950s. The Medds were leading figures in the Hertfordshire county schools programme. Using a prefabricated system, first to build single-storey primary schools and then two ...”

“... of the magazine to hire women … and for many years it hired only women.’ An editor wrote the young ladies a cheering memo: Checking is … sometimes regarded as a dull and tedious occupation, but such a conception of this position is extremely erroneous. Any bright girl who really applies herself to the handling of the checking problem can have a very ...”

“... stutters and veers like a faulty rocket; what boosted the talent for picture-making he showed when young into something remarkable was contact with other artists. In the compelling self-portrait drawing of around 1824-25, as memorable as any by an English artist, he seems both vulnerable and determined. He was then just out of his teens; a couple of years ...”

“... gardens tend to put painters off. In The Tragic Muse Henry James describes the reaction of a young painter called Nick Dormer to a garden of that sort. Nick feels himself ‘catch the smile’ of ‘named and numbered acres’. He appreciates that they have a ‘charm to which he had not perhaps hitherto done justice’ and doesn’t dislike them as much ...”

“... among its impeccable olde London costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic ...”

“... back ‘in the Old Country’. ‘I forget which one exactly,’ he says. A memory flash shows a young Grampa on a boat where everyone has an Irish accent mixed with something that might be Polish. But the subtlest and funniest joke in the episode, the one that best sums up all the hypocrisy thriving then and now on the subject of immigration and therefore ...”

“... camps of the Soviet state and the death camps of the Nazis: the latter journey, accompanying a young boy, David, and the woman who looks after him on the journey, Sofya Levinton, I found that I could not reread. The horror is all the more real because we have actually witnessed the gas chambers being built, and an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that she was displaying ‘an affectation of indifference for all that is interesting to most young girls of her age’, and was rude to her mother. Isa Boit appears primarily in the record as a lively and gregarious hostess – ‘always social, always irresponsible, always expansive, always amused and amusing’, James wrote – and it’s tempting to ...”

“... measurement was only 31, a fact which did not dismay her, as she intended to marry one of three young men out of her extensive acquaintance who happened to find themselves drawn to boyish figures, and although she did not know about such things as precisely as did her aunt, Dorothy knew well enough that her hipless and breastless shape would always attract ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... privacy is even now being fiercely defended by Stephen Spender against the intrusive Hugh David. There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit ...”

“... where the awful sadness of everything suddenly becomes clear. In ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’, a young girl realises that her father must once have been in love with a woman he couldn’t marry because of small-town anti-Catholic bigotry: So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car ...”