“... as typical – ‘he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm’. The young people’s pre-Aids freedom from moral constraints, assessed with brutality but also an angry humour, sets them down in ‘paradise’ – at least in the envious eyes of ‘everyone old’ watching ‘everyone ...”

“... enough to read the historian Ibn Khaldun, who was active in the 14th century. Crucially for the young Kilito, culture itself in those days was coloured French; colonial cringe meant that for a long time literature wasn’t considered worthy of the name in the Middle East and North Africa unless it fitted into the European tradition (the US didn’t set the ...”

“... marriage, his growing irritability and an obscure triangular relationship with his wife and a young woman called Leontine Chipman, nicknamed Canada. After Willie’s death his widow Emily and Canada lived happily ever after, until Emily died leaving everything to Canada and nothing to Forster, who was disappointed. The domestic and sexual permutations ...”

“... of Aquarium, is how a newly-promoted Soviet general, with his own clientage to create, recruits a young protégé to Soviet military intelligence. GRU, the Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Soviet General Staff, is an entirely different matter from the KGB, the secret police whose presence in the Soviet Union is ubiquitous and which would-be recruits ...”

“... for worse! How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young alas and take heart. Or better worse say still a watch of night alas to come. A rest of last watch to come. And take heart. It would be a great pity if, nowadays, Beckett had become more celebrated than read, or if the classic status of the early work had ...”

“... to democratic publics could make power change its ways. The blockade, doing its work on the young and old alike, was one way to teach that pitiless lesson. That she was responsible for the good conduct of the nation would probably have struck my husband’s great-grandmother, bent over her washtub, as absurd. But it did not seem absurd to the millions ...”

“... transformations. This account is both more accurate and more attractive, especially to young people of diverse backgrounds and media competencies who might be new to much of the work on display. (Such changes attest to the influence of an in-house think tank called Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives, or C-MAP. Rather than franchise ...”

“... submitted a script about Ulster’s part in the Second World War. There was a line in it about a young guy, Ray Hughes, who’d joined the British Army – ‘amazing, and him a Catholic!’ one character chipped in. David had objected strongly, saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of ...”

“... of things Bergson might have grown up to be a British, not a French philosopher, except that as a young Jewish boy in Victorian England he might not have found his education coming to him as easily or as triumphantly as it did in Paris, where ten years later he finished second of his year in the agrégation, one place ahead of his rival and classmate, the ...”

“... ever played the games I wrote was me. My older sister wasn’t interested; my other sister was too young; and when friends came round we were more likely to spend the time out on our bikes or climbing trees or playing football. Writing computer games, like any kind of writing, or even like reading, was a solitary activity. If we did huddle round the ...”

“... away; the meek shall inherit the earth; tender mercies; clean hands and a pure heart; I have been young and now am old; my cup runneth over; many a time; clean gone; the days of old; I am a worm and no man; his heart’s desire; the heavens declare the glory of god; go down to the sea in ships; at their wits’ end; the valley of the shadow of death; make a ...”

“... 25 years old, a colleen from County Limerick, ‘possessed of considerable attractions’. Widowed young, she had turned, like thousands of others in late Victorian London, to prostitution. One of her clients had taken her for a spree to Paris, and she had started to call herself Marie Jeanette. She was also nicknamed Ginger. She lay with her head ‘turned on ...”

“... Amritsar . . . Amritsar is in Punjab’) in order to bum a cigarette. There is the smart-alecky young subway dweller named Heather Covington, a casualty of mental illness and medication herself, who deflates Will’s earnest provocations with pointed jokes. When Will tries to explain that global warming is shaped like an upward curve, rather than a straight ...”

“... as an entrance into imagining and longing and learning. In her teens she belonged in a set of keen young readers and writers, girls and boys – they shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”