“... index and symbol of a host of other attitudes and relations. We start in the year 1952 with nine young people, students at a college of London University, who meet regularly, at great inconvenience to themselves, for an eight o’clock weekday mass. This is beyond the call of duty, even for the New Testament Study Group of which they are members, and there ...”

“... and place in order to situate the ambiguities, coincidences, ironies and paradoxes that beset the young protagonist as he takes his first steps towards the even more bewildering world of adolescence. Yet this very attention to detail threatens to subjugate literature to historiography – a danger which Coetzee has spent his life circumventing, with ...”

“... outsmart them.’ They are very smart and, unlike most birds, great learners and interpreters. A young naturalist who grew up birding in San Francisco – we have Great Blue Herons in Golden Gate Park and a considerable seabird population on the beaches – told me he considered ravens and crows to be tantamount to a ‘second Silent Spring’ (the first ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... with more acuity than the world-historical events that seem only barely to have affected her. As a young woman, in the early 1930s, she had gone so far as to join the Communist Party, but Beauman is right to make little of this. Really Taylor just admired how the early British Communists seemed to follow ‘the teachings of Christ with the sharing of ...”

“... in failure. For most of her adult life, she needed the financial support of her brother William Michael. The Brontë sisters also tried to set up a school – a regular ploy among educated women without money or husbands in the mid-Victorian period. They too failed. Then Emily and Anne died. Charlotte didn’t have a well-funded and well-disposed brother to ...”

“... but as mirrors or foils for the protagonist. Each of the eight stories concentrates on a lonely young black person; in seven out of the eight, a girl. The stories show how that character’s perception of herself and the world changes as she encounters people different from herself. The first story, one of the most effective, is about a troop of black ...”

“... poor but members of the skilled working class. Sailors tended to start their working lives young, even by 18th-century standards, and few of them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and ...”

“... bears little resemblance to the archetypal Irish revolutionary as sketched by Tom Garvin: a young man from the country, aspiring and impatient, frustrated of opportunities, working at a level below that befitting his education. His Mayo background, as the son of a solicitor’s clerk in Castlebar, remained hugely important to him, however, and when the ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... could come and go, travel or pursue an education, seek work or live outside the camp, and (for the young and female) trade companionship or sex for meals, dates or even marriage: for a DP woman, Fitzpatrick writes, marriage to an American GI was ‘as good as it got’. Indeed, DPs who were young at the time often remember ...”

“... was the germ of the problem. How to use it and prevent it petrifying us were deep issues for the young poet. They went back to his Church of Ireland upbringing (his father was rector of Carrickfergus, later bishop of Down) though they were given distinctive shape by his classical education at Marlborough and Oxford. Probably no poet since Milton has been as ...”

“... fractious era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift ...”

“... getting the clap,’ he remembered. In descriptions by himself and others, he emerges as a feral young fellow who did not let much bother him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well ...”

“... of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.) But what the novel takes for granted is the young hero’s military status. Ernie didn’t. Every other letter through the latter half of 1917 into 1918 is filled with hopes of a secondment, but the truth is he missed most of the war and made a great deal of the skirmish that cut his legs. (No bones were ...”