“... scene. Even L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between waxes lyrical as he describes how his costumeless young hero has to watch from the bank as the giggling girls of the house party splash each other in their long linen bathing dresses, which undulate about them as they set out more purposefully into deep water.And Charles Sprawson is inspired as well, scarcely ...”

“... in Bain’s sumptuously-illustrated monograph not only tells us much about the way Bewick and his young apprentices worked, but also reminds us of the graphic power of his engraving. Compared with his prints, Bewick’s watercolours are disappointing. His birds and animals, for all their delicacy of tone, are both less animate and less substantial than their ...”

“... around with fictive devices. The headmistress, Miss Thorne, borrows a literary review from a young man on an airplane. ‘Just my sort of reading!’ she says smugly – and then she reads this: ‘The discussion falls on the concept of structuralist reading and the exposure of the artistic process as being an achievement, on semantic levels, of ...”

“... afterwards I too found myself improbably mesmerised by Irvine Welsh’s often squalid tales of young heroin addicts from Leith, Edinburgh’s blustery, downtrodden port, in the late 1980s. With its needles and cravings, its bare junkie flats and shivery withdrawal scenes, its hovering premonitions of HIV and death, Trainspotting in some ways resembled a ...”

“... good-bye dead men. The tsaddik’s face, his nickel-rimmed pince-nez.   ‘Where are you from young man?’   ‘From Odessa.’   ‘How is life there?’   ‘People live.’   ‘And here it’s a horror.’ More has probably been written about Babel’s Jewishness than about any other aspect of him. He served under a Christian nom de ...”

“... is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ‘knights and ladies, masters and slaves’. Atlanta was actually a frontier ...”

“... when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of Christianity’, but an account of a heroic triumph: More had mixed with the society ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”

“... composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of ...”

“... grandparents vivid memories of the hardship and degradation of Tredegar between the wars, but just young enough to have benefited from the post-war Welfare State and the Sixties expansion of higher education. (A typical product of that expansion, who was able to pick up qualifications casually and without exertion while concentrating his energies on rugby and ...”

“... pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. ‘He did well here, and died ...”

“... late in the 1950s, a publisher asked me to read the typescript of a fiercely revisionist book by a young military historian who had gathered up the views of the generals Monty had sacked in the Western Desert. The publisher hardly needed to be told by me that the book would create a scandal. I now learn from Nigel Hamilton’s pages that Monty also was shown a ...”

“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... them independence and a degree of power? Learning shorthand and typing was once a way for a young man to have an exciting career as a journalist, or, like Dickens and his shadow David Copperfield, to become a parliamentary reporter. When the First World War and the economics of differential wages for male and female ...”

“... Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began the first historical-critical edition of his works. In 1915, a year before he died at Verdun, Hellingrath delivered a lecture describing Hölderlin as ‘the most German of Germans’, whose luminous hymns confide their message ‘only to the select few’ and remain ‘perhaps never penetrable to non-Germans ...”