“... 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 ...”

“... civilised, increasingly mid-Atlantic, Thirties drawl was hard to hear above the din of the Angry Young Men in London and the Wild Men of New York (novelists who stabbed their wives in the stomach). As a screenwriter, Isherwood has credits on The Great Sinner (a Dostoevsky biopic), a vehicle for Shirley Temple, and a treatment of Carson McCullers’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... box ready to accompany me back to London for repair’. At the airport, she was confronted by a young man in military uniform who demanded to see the contents of the box. Busby refused, only to realise that she was surrounded by ‘unsmiling soldiers with guns, monitoring everything and everyone’. She abandoned the radio, ‘along with my illusions of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week when I was rung by the Independent (journalist’s name forgotten) wanting my comments on a movement for Yorkshire independence. I say I have ...”

“... little darling reads these sorts of books at his age, what will he do when he grows up?” ’ The young Jean-Paul retorts precociously, ‘Je les vivrai’ – a reply which proved a lasting success. Even more long-lasting than his family imagined: first Sartre lived the threateningly anti-bourgeois life described in the dangerous classics; now, for long ...”

“... wanting to change career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of southern Oregon. I put the ...”