“... towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who ...”

“... thoroughly influenced by, Blunt’s contempt for the Levantine ‘Gosmoboleet’. Lawrence, the young archaeologist saturated with Burton, Palgrave and Doughty, became obsessed with the idea, first mooted by Blunt, of an Arab empire headed by the Hashemite clan. The unfortunate ‘Gosmoboleets’ and ‘bastard Irakis’ had the Sherif Hussein’s sons ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and ...”

“... against ‘80,000 incorrigible Jacobins’ he was thinking not of the popular societies but of the young radical intelligentsia of Britain. These were the students, young attorneys, merchants’ sons and daughters, who signalled their advanced views by changes in dress and hair-style, in education and child care and ...”

“... and Gwen Williams’s cottage, where Raymond grew up. Assembled in the churchyard, ‘Raymond’s young men’ (as his wife, Joy, used to call them) are now middle-aged and showing signs of wear and tear, ‘thinning and unkempt hair ... a bad back here, a heavy paunch there’. Sartorially, they are drabbies, ‘awful old grey suits and worse black ties ...”

“... 200 billion dollars . . . And we’re paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is ...”

“... afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.Eno’s young life was lived between flat countryside and the beckoning sea, but he had other horizons too: Catholicism (he attended the Convent School of Jesus and Mary in Ipswich and his confirmation name was St Jean-Baptiste de la Salle); imported American music ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... from Pat Buchanan, certainly, though less threateningly, from the Louisiana ex-Ku-Klux-Klansman, David Duke. Neither is likely to succeed, but as a moderate who has committed the deadly sin of raising taxes, Bush knows that he has to make some attempt to conciliate the more conservative wing of his party. Since the collapse of Communism has left him with few ...”

“... was at first confidently expected of him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did ...”

“... on 14 January the Army, using anti-tank missiles, destroyed a student house and killed three young Palestinians. It is difficult to describe the sensation of entering the mosque, which, even more than Jerusalem’s al-Haram al-Sharif, is guarded with great visibility by Israeli soldiers. The entrances of the Haram are hundreds of metres away from the two ...”

“... last summer as I sat in the tearoom of Cambridge University Library and eavesdropped. Three very young, very bright, very civilised British historians were discussing a recent work on Dutch history, written by a one-time Cambridge don long since departed to the States. It had been acclaimed by reviewers as a bravura performance. It had been translated into ...”

“... death, and is set in the present, when Cuba and Nicaragua fill the dreams of the European young. Some of the European young: perhaps Böll was not entirely up-to-date with the fading popularity of radical dreams. But the time here really stretches back to 1945. It is a whole post-war Germany that is being ...”

“... in the family’s Wisconsin past; the break-up of his marriage; his consequent separation from his young son; and by a descent into depression and isolation that brought him close to personal collapse – out of which he was able to write himself. The experiences he painstakingly and movingly records, the patterns of coincidence and uncanny connectedness he ...”