“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outsmart them.’ They are very smart and, unlike most birds, great learners and interpreters. A young naturalist who grew up birding in San Francisco – we have Great Blue Herons in Golden Gate Park and a considerable seabird population on the beaches – told me he considered ravens and crows to be tantamount to a ‘second Silent Spring’ (the first ...”

“... no way.’ Zeus’ beloved Ganymede has no problem with immortality. Eternal, and eternally young, he serves as Zeus’ wine-pourer, dispensing a substance whose liquid state suggests his continued (sexual) vitality and contrasts powerfully with the desiccated condition of the old (Tithonos, in some versions of the myth, turns into the dry but ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1962. For all migrants, Britain was ‘the mother country’. Stuart came as a Rhodes scholar, a young anti-colonial, to Oxford. Like most of the Windrush generation he stayed, learning new political identities – first West Indian, then Black – over troubled decades. I learned what it meant to live in a mixed couple, something that carried one set of ...”

“... might know its heroes. It’s ironic that Liudmila Saraskina’s deeply admiring biography of the David who challenged the Soviet Goliath should now appear under its imprint. As Saraskina tells the story, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian, was a man with a mission from the first. Unswerving, uncompromising, beset by perils and ...”

“... specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of protesters trying to storm the Christodora during the riots ...”

“... Arnold Toynbee was a double-edged privilege, as the behaviour of the family testifies; when the young author published his first book under this style, he was reprimanded for appropriating his uncle’s name and told in future to ‘sign yourself A.J. or Arnold J’. Born with his uncle’s reputation to live up to, the ...”