“... meaning. One touchstone is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which the camera stalks young Danny at just above ground level as he pedals his tricycle down the interminable featureless passageways of the Overlook Hotel. ‘The Shining,’ Luckhurst concludes, ‘revealed something about the emotional latency of corridors: a simple lesson in the ...”

“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”

“... Strane with her therapist; she trusts that nobody else will understand. ‘It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him,’ she explains in a summary introduction that primes the reader for a lengthy statement of denial.Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could ...”

“... ripe for resolution, often because the necessary laboratory techniques have just come on stream. Robert Koch’s choice of anthrax in 1873 is a brilliant instance of this. Thanks to anthrax, he founded bacteriology as a science and in little over a decade catapulted himself from the life of a rural doctor in a small town in Posen – a province of the Second ...”

“... It is lifted out, suspended, musing, as in ‘A Morning in Vicenza’: The sun was so fragile, so young, that we were a little scared; a careless move might scratch it, just a shout – if anyone had tried – might do it harm; only the rushing swifts, with wings hard as cast-iron, were free to sing out loud, because they’d spent their brief, uneasy ...”

“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... dread, how about it?’) At the moment, literary Stockholm is abuzz over a stunt pulled by a young poet, whose acclaimed new book has just turned out to be entirely plagiarised from translations of American poets called Robert – Creeley, Mezey, Bly, Lowell, Penn Warren etc. The perpetrator had sent a copy of the book ...”

“... were increasingly split by the advance of education between the multiplying numbers of literate young, for whom modernity was the key to social betterment, and the elders, who controlled the institutions of the village community and wanted to hold the outside world at bay – both groups being revolutionary in their different ways. It is that the Russian ...”

“... of sexual impulses, and repressive in its recommendations about how they should be handled in young people, his Emile enjoys a thoroughly undeserved reputation as a liberal educational tract. Emancipated sexual belief gets a better showing when we downgrade a notch, to the realm of the popular and the practically reformist. The awkward case of William ...”

“... of the early 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross sued Ernst and Young and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United ...”

“... endured by a child dying of tuberculous meningitis or paralysed by spinal disease, the notion of a young life being extinguished after a slow decline was once the inspiration of many novels and much poetry. In The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos remark how death from consumption, because ‘it was believed to affect chiefly sensitive natures . . . could be ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural ...”

“... the gods, about tyranny, freedom and political change, and about a slow path to maturity for one young man (Orestes) and an entire culture. That ‘maturity’ turns out to involve the subordination of women and of the family, which is conceived as feminine, to enable the creation of a political community like real-life historical Athens, in which male ...”

“... the impossible. Bear in mind that even in this group there are sharp differences in ability. As Robert X. Cringely, a (pseudonymous) commentator on the computer business who in 1991 published Accidental Empires, the first and still the best book on the growth of the industry, explains: at the extreme edge of the normal distribution, there are programmers ...”

“... the writing of A Small Boy. Thus in his immensely useful compilation, A Henry James Encyclopedia, Robert Gale maintains that William is ‘the hero of James’s autobiography, especially its earlier parts’. James had himself indicated as much when he first discussed a ‘family book’ with William’s heirs during the months, stretching to nearly a ...”