“... in the Lords and bask, as perhaps we shouldn’t, in the praise we get afterwards. If we meet young people, we invariably find them of real interest – they tend to be bright and good-looking and to bode well for the future. If we are able to separate ourselves from our guide (and it isn’t easy to walk out on him, it must be said), we will usually ...”

“... for touch-me-not persons. Diana-Titania falls helplessly in love with a comic version of the very young man whom she had cruelly enchanted with the stag’s head and horns. Bully Bottom, monster of the comic baroque, becomes the creature she dotes upon. Thus the baroque acts both to fantasise the personal and explore, in the most searchingly realistic ...”

“... it’s because that’s what it was: reactionary in the best and purest sense of the word. A young French journalist, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, wrote in Le Monde, as the draft moved towards finality: ‘Our parliamentarians at Strasbourg are playing at being lawyers from 1789 and liberals from the 19th century.’ It is time’s whirligig which in ...”

“... finds him in Operational Research for the Air Force. He comes out of this experience an angry young man, shocked by the waste of lives in what he sees as senseless bombing of cities, and equally by official obtuseness in failing to accept measures that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... left. Best supporting actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big ...”

“... was funded by the military but run by Auer. Siegfried was 45, ambitious for himself and his young family, and this was an opportunity to advance his career. He worked with diphosgene, waste from which was dumped in the river where his children swam. The plant also synthesised diphenyl arsine chloride, a fiendish gas that penetrated ...”

“... the Queen. There is indeed some truth in all these comparisons; and Britten himself changed. The young prodigy of Donald Mitchell’s book can be admired in the unshakable security of his historical position, revolutionising insular British music and performance, and almost single-handedly recreating British opera; the older man is increasingly (and latterly ...”

“... in’ that day, so it was no big surprise when I was greeted at the terminal by an eager-eyed young pressman. He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press Room. Therein, dead-centre, was a small stage flooded with television lights, and on the stage a couple of black leatherette TV armchairs. An airport ...”

“... on the cover of the notorious ‘Ern Malley’ issue. Ern Malley was a poet invented by two young men who thought Modernism had destroyed the craft of verse. They compiled his poems by picking fragments at random from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Shakespeare and a dictionary of quotations. For many Australians, this hoax confirmed that Modernism was a ...”

“... the road, she drags herself along, semi-invited, to a New Year’s Eve party at the Skidelskys (‘Robert ... is a brilliant historian who was made a lord this summer’). Needless to say, none of these occasions turns out quite as she would have wished. At the Booker dinner, she has a pretty uninspiring time next to Kingsley Amis (who deserts her for ‘more ...”

“... He sees the inauthentic everywhere: from a coffee-shop window in Soho he watches a group of young film-industry professionals, with their mobiles slipped into the back pockets of their low-slung jeans, stand about in the street, laughing and looking carefree. Entirely conscious that they’re being watched, they’re as studied as can be, as if they ...”

“... most telling anecdotes concerns the great man’s failure to amuse Jacqueline’s daughter and her young friend by wearing a red student’s cap Penrose had brought from Venice. Afterwards he sat in a room alone, weeping. ‘Whatever humour may dominate,’ Penrose writes, ‘there is always instability in P.’s mood. While in the happiest of moods, for some ...”

“... on 27 June 2024 is not how old Biden seemed but that he managed to make Trump appear relatively young. Trump was at that point the second oldest presidential candidate in American history – second only to Biden – yet Biden’s intermittently ashen, waxen, leaden, frozen performance had the effect of giving Trump a youthful glow. The ex-president looked ...”

“... for the ‘puritanism’ of his judgments, was surely right that the praise lavished on the very young poet had not exactly helped to curb the self-advertising, self-indulgent strain in his writing. Certainly, success came early and came hot. His contributions to Oxford Poetry (in 1929, when he was 20) were singled out for praise by metropolitan ...”