“... We​ needed a new bathroom, and found some plumbers – interesting, attractive young men with remarkable stories to tell about their lives and travels around the world. The most interesting of them – S.’s sister described him as ‘a hot mess’ – went home after work one evening having forgotten to tighten a nut, which led to a leak and the near collapse of our kitchen ceiling ...”

“... Bell, the most directly autobiographical of the trilogy, recounts the obsession of Bob, the young waiter at the pub, with the prostitute Jenny, who happens to come in one day. Hamilton himself had much the same experience, but Bob, an ex-merchant seaman, is very much a character in his own right. The barmaid, Ella, loves him hopelessly, and he is always ...”

“... the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an ...”

“... two men parted ways and in 1958 Kirby returned to Goodman’s fold, where he and Steve Ditko, a young artist who later became a reclusive follower of Ayn Rand, worked under Lee’s direction. Instead of giving them scripts to illustrate, Lee evolved the ‘Marvel Method’, which involved a quick meeting to hash out a story idea. One or other of the artists ...”

“... up a path to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Curiously, given his current stance, the young Wolfowitz was just as concerned about the emergence of a nuclear Israel as he was about Arab states with WMD. Other Vulcans have similarly tortuous career paths. The Nixon tapes reveal that an earlier Republican administration was troubled during the spring ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does not constitute harassment’ to call your ...”

“... to a series of silly, deluded tributes to the ‘working man’, to ‘real men’, to ‘young East End and Essex people’, to nameless old men ‘puffing on a soggy Woodbine, faces pinched and quenched by life’; the sort of man ‘who walked the Northern streets with his delicate whippet at his side’. Changes are on the way that will make the ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... there is likely to be little revelation of others. Reading the diary, we wonder how much this young man failed to perceive, and how much he deliberately ignored or repressed. None of his fellow explorers is vivid in these pages; we read about what they did, but that is all we learn about them. He writes almost nothing about the tensions that inevitably ...”

“... as a romantic culture has dreamed it, believing that brilliant comets burn out, that talent dies young (in its forties, as a rule, if we try to assess the celebrated instances). Both deaths belong to a toll in which accident and suicide are often indistinguishable. Thomas’s verse spoke darkly about the return to a mother, and, quite plainly, about the lost ...”

“... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of ...”

“... Ginsberg). Travel is another instance, and when Koch writes about his experiences in Sweden as a young man, his amusing and unassuming manner turns towards the world: The only thing I could say in Swedish Was ‘Yog talar endast svenska’ Which meant I speak only Swedish, whereas I thought it meant I DON’T speak Swedish. So the ...”

“... to swim for land, or helpless and praying, being either old, or infirm, or with children too young to climb down ropes, or after slipping on fuel-sloshed and tilting decks, having found themselves trapped in the depths of the ship where the water was rising. Thirty-two passengers died that night, by drowning or from hypothermia. The island of ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”