“... lesser literary attributes, self-pity, when I think of some of the things we were exposed to so young. But it was quite common. The most popular picture round our way – every family had one, usually above a three-bar fire – was a commercial painting called The Weeping Boy. There were several versions of it, but they all showed a child in distress. I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of snakes; most illegitimate bites are to the arms and upper body (the victims are usually young men with a point to prove), while most accidental bites are to the legs and feet. The mortality rate has fallen considerably over the past half century, with the more widespread availability of anti-venoms and the decline in snake numbers as a result of ...”

“... Tapan Das’s mother lived in the weaving village of Shantipur. She became pregnant when very young, and when Tapan was two, he was denounced as illegitimate and abandoned outside the village. An old woman took pity on him and took him home, but her own family could not bear the scandal and she too was banished. She brought him up in a shed by the ...”

“... the men are rich and the women want to be seen for who they really are. Ana has no time to be Young and Restless: she’s too busy following the ‘dangerous’ Christian Grey from place to place, or feeling a ‘current’ going through her whenever he turns up. A current that goes all the way down to her sex. In fairness to Ana, there are several things ...”

“... is becoming privatised. In a world awash with weapons and in regions awash with unemployed young males, wars have become cheap to wage. Relying on internationally supported refugee camps as supply depots and recruiting bases, they are easy to sustain. For those calling the shots, they are frequently profitable as well – profit figuring prominently as ...”

“... mosque in Manama. Some insight into Jackson’s life in the Middle East was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal ...”

“... eyes. The market for male ‘general interest’ magazines has grown massively in the UK, as if young men suddenly needed to be celebrated and serviced in a new way, as if there were a new demand among them for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of ...”

“... to believe that Laura Bush has ever entertained. At 17, Alice accidentally kills her first crush, Andrew Imhof, in a traumatic car crash. She loses her religious faith; she dreams of Andrew regularly for the rest of her life; and she internalises his memory as a lost standard of ideal romance: ‘...”

“... best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little kindness, but now and then it proved a wise ...”

“... the pre-1914 welfare economist A.C. Pigou, whose lack of interest in ideology and keen interest in young mountaineers was supposedly deliberate cover enabling him to suborn those politically committed to the left. (As will be seen, King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds ...”

“... on in his time at the brutal US prison camp in Kandahar, Begg got a visit from two MI5 agents, ‘Andrew’ and ‘Matt’. He recognised Andrew; Begg ran an Islamic bookshop in Birmingham in the late 1990s and like many politically active Muslims in England, he was visited at home by MI5. ‘Seeing a British person, I had ...”

“... Woolwich, the Arts Council, the BBC and Oxford, with incidental observations on the conduct of the young, the remembered follies of youth, the tiresome defects of age, and so forth. One reason may be that Fuller, to an even greater degree than most of us, delights in coincidence, in those random and often tenuous connections between people which for a moment ...”

“... in the 1970s they stuck it into education,’ said Iain. ‘They said, “We’ll invest in the young,” and out of that they developed high standards of environmental protection. And those people are now voting. Next thing we knew they want 10p on plastic bags. But we have not done environmental stewardship before now, that’s why people think the whole ...”

“... in the Bank of England, who was tried on a charge of complicity to defraud the bank of £10,000. Young Turner was acquitted, but the affair is still referred to as ‘Turner’s Fraud’. Frederick William Turner, our author’s father, was a churchgoer and a teetotaller, a desk-man in the Post Office Engineering Department in Liverpool. Ernest Turner was ...”