“... chemistry student. Knowing nothing about him, I expected to see a portly professor: in came a slim young man who looked like one of us students and was quite without pomp. We were enormously impressed. I next encountered him in Cambridge in 1947, when he told my wife and me that he had never wanted to build an atomic bomb for Hitler. Fortunately, he did not ...”

“... with other footloose professors? There seems to be an ‘only connect’ issue somewhere here. David Trotter’s book begins with the word ‘perhaps’. It echoes in the mind for a while. He contends that in the fiction of Defoe and Dickens the metaphor of circulation of the blood, as proposed by William Harvey in 1616, marries with the metaphor of money ...”

“... scrutiny by the sociologists, and Richard Hoggart was affirming in The Uses of Literacy that a young man like Potter is ‘cut off by his parents as much as by his talent which urges him to break away from his group’. Alienation was all the rage and Potter took on the role of outsider on the inside with relish. At Oxford he was a working-class ...”

“... though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster.Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... occasion of my mother’s telling), she screamed at the doctors who informed her that when a young lady gets a bad headache the reason is that she’s been thinking too hard, and they ejected her (despite her screaming) from the emergency room into a thunderstorm. I like to think that if I am in line for a brain fever I shall be better prepared than my ...”

“... story between him and his parents – and it is – this is where the marriage hits the rocks. The young lovers grow apart. They want other things. They become different people who no longer understand one another. To assimilate is to break faith with your parents, and assimilation is necessary for survival. It’s inevitable that Shteyngart would begin to ...”

“... database, research grant and exclusive access to the subject’s papers. In the first a young Negro of high intelligence, great physical strength and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to ...”

“... Collins. Marjory Chapman, incidentally, was the talent-spotter who, many years on, picked out the young Alastair MacNeill. It is the biographer’s handicap that MacLean, despite living his life under a golden shower, remained a private, prosaic and tetchy character. Writers who pound their typewriters all their lives are apt to be a thankless study, no ...”

“... he began composing, and also sketching opera plots; his family thought they had done well for the young man in obtaining a post for him as conductor at the Magdeburg Theatre. It turned out to be a disaster: Wagner was not paid properly; and after a performance of his opera was cancelled because the cast had beaten itself bloody in a brawl before the curtain ...”

“... and many of Rutherford’s experiments designed to solve that structure had been pointless. Young scientists will be relieved to learn from this book that even Rutherford did some ‘damn silly’ experiments at times. At the seminar I was overawed by the giants of physics and sat on one of the back benches, but another graduate student, Fred (now Sir ...”

“... one,’ he says rather oddly) ‘lost his faith as a direct result of seeing’ that great young man’s performance. After four years of undergraduate life at Oxford, he had to think of a career. After a year at Harvard, he put himself into the hands of one of those London institutions ‘long dedicated to coaching Civil Service candidates’, where ...”

“... had taken a street car to Vincennes and walked round the fortifications. He gossiped. ‘Like all young men,’ he said, ‘I had a dose of the clap, but I never had much of a fling.’ He sang snatches of Italian opera, translating the words; hummed the minuet from Don Giovanni and, carried away by the rhythm, invited the naked model down from the table to ...”

“... in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead’ and laughing at ‘the society that had reared them’.The four cast members of Beyond the Fringe soon decamped to New York, where the revue achieved even longer-running success on Broadway than it ...”