“... and history, wore nail polish and borrowed his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the darkened cinema and as each character pulled out his weapon and began firing furiously, the young Arab men around us would groan and moan in a kind of ecstasy, crying out the names of the weapons. All around us in the cinema we could hear the words ‘Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov; Biretta, Biretta.’ These young men knew ...”

“... know this is a big movie, no skimpy, fake-ass wannabe shit.’ Lee’s idea of a big movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over the River Kwai. He is also a great admirer of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Later we get a better look at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the publishers in America’, Wolfe scanned ‘the billion-footed city for the approach of the young novelists who, surely, would bring [us] the big novels of the racial clashes, the hippy movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam. But such creatures, it seemed, no longer existed.’ But this was to ignore, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... new film version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, with a screenplay by a young American TV writer, is foggier. Changez (Riz Ahmed) is portrayed as a violent man from the outset; ‘you’ is a more developed and more sympathetic character. Changez is shown to be more ruthless than his colleagues when it comes to firing ...”

“... allegedly because the nuns would not at first admit the firefighters in case they saw any of the young girls in a state of undress.) The third factor, it becomes increasingly clear, was the commercial failure of his play Faustus Kelly, now made available to us again in this edition of O’Brien’s Plays and Teleplays. Daniel Keith Jernigan, the book’s ...”

“... and as only children, they have always been shielded by their well-off parents. I know young people who drift continually from one job to another: as soon as they get bored or unhappy, they quit – they don’t bother having a back-up plan. According to JWT Intelligence, 74 per cent of Chinese millennials say they would start their own business if ...”

“... Islands at the fag-end of rationing. Circulating freely between kitchen and dining-room was the young Canadian American sociologist Erving Goffman, who had come all the way from Chicago to observe what passed across the boundary between stage performance and backstage preparation. That kitchen stood proxy for all the social world’s backstages. If the ...”

“... the idol of a little boy who wants to join the Navy, and he dances around a fountain with a young girl made up to look Mexican. This dance was particularly hard to rehearse because Stanley Donen (then Kelly’s assistant, later his co-director) had to teach the child the steps. After some gruelling rehearsals, Donen was so desperate he said he ...”