“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Taliban’s Kandahar heartland with a colleague from the New York Times. We had seen wide-eyed young Taliban fighters in Kabul, like peasant boys parachuted into Gomorrah, rip cassettes out of car stereos and stride into hospitals to order female doctors home and men to grow beards. Now we wanted to meet the ideologues who had launched the movement. We ...”

“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... innocence of childhood; and have great mountain tumults and sonorities in adolescence and young manhood; and afterwards there are the slow fertile turnings of maturity, when the river becomes ever deeper and wider; until at last it empties itself into the bitter immensity of death, the ocean of the end? And by an extension of the metaphor, the river ...”