“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the sons of his friends and former colleagues are swimming with the New Labour tide: Edward and David Miliband, sons of his old friend Ralph; Charles Clarke, son of Benn’s former Permanent Secretary, and so on. Some of the most poignant moments come when the Millbank machine tries to whip in its oldest member, reducing him in May 1999 to writing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of several groups of predominantly Asian men in other parts of England for sexually abusing young white girls, whose complaints had not at first been taken seriously by police. ‘Events of recent months in contexts very different from electoral malpractice,’ Mawrey said, ‘have starkly demonstrated what happens when those in authority are afraid to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Bolsheviks’ old opponents in the Marxist revolutionary movement) such as Boris Nikolaevsky, David Dalin and Rafael Abramovich – and Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian Provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. When Nikolaevsky and Dalin visited the DP camps in Germany, Russian DPs anxiously waiting for US visas saw them as ...”

“... After. That work made nonsense of the notion, fostered by Israel’s dynamic first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his acolytes, that ‘Israel’s leaders sought desperately to make peace with one or all of the Arab states but the Arabs, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, turned down these overtures and repaid this goodwill with continued ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”

“... of the seemingly unshakeable bipartisan commitment to US global hegemony has been produced by young US-based thinkers on the left, unshackled from Cold War groupthink: Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana, Jeanne Morefield, Nicholas Mulder, Christy Thornton, Daniel Bessner, Stephen Wertheim, Samuel Moyn et al. Their views share a sense of the incapacity of US force to ...”

“... ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He recommended the young and unpublished Patricia Highsmith to Yaddo in 1948. In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in ...”