“... not the central figure, whether or not he has been hit by ” an arrow. This view was dismissed by David Wilson in his superb colour facsimile of 1985. It turns out, however, that the scene as we know it is the result of a restoration in the earlier 19th century. The areas in which work was done included, crucially, the flights on the end of the missile in or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings Mrs Bush initiated at the White House. Sittenfeld identified strongly with the portrayal of Laura Bush as a ‘voracious reader of fiction’, whose favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov. And ...”

“... state and the character of social relations. Should assets be transferred from rich to poor, from young to old, or simply across an individual’s own life? Should the solutions and institutions be private or public? Should the cost be covered by compulsory taxes or left to private initiatives, possibly encouraged by tax incentives? At one extreme are systems ...”

“... with Hays and, after her, with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, but a long secret affair with a young woman who married her adopted son, thus becoming her daughter-in-law. This ‘matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household’, as Sharon Marcus describes it in Between Women, was not, however, ‘branded as deviant’. Cushman was ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...”

“... novels, far fewer imagine themselves as middle-aged. In Britain between the wars a respectable young lady, dependent on her father for an allowance, had limited options. She expected and was expected to marry. A graduate might find professional employment, but the marriage bar stymied careers in many areas, including teaching and the civil ...”

“... jazz/blues record – Bessie Smith’s classic ‘St Louis Blues’ from 1925, which featured a young Louis Armstrong playing cornet.This collision of models meant that Tippett’s music tended to develop through rupture and disjoint: the idea of combining disparate strands to form a neatly arranged whole never appealed to him. The English musical ...”