“... the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for the 21st century.‘How to Write about Africa’ set the tone for a weary scepticism about the way non-Africans behave or speak when they arrive on the continent. For the British-Nigerian essayist Dipo ...”

“... and patrician carriage promoted his career. Todd is not a man who could ever have been overlooked. Young Alex walked to and from school in wretched wartime shoes (those were great days for the profiteers who were said to make cardboard shoes for issue to the trenches). Todd thinks it was these shoes in conjunction with the inadequate wartime diet that were ...”

“... them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young Huxley, desirous of one of the few footholds in a poorly-paid scientific profession, to the time when Owen redesigned his dinosaurs to make sure they could not possibly fit Huxley’s phylogeny. Much of the fascination of Desmond’s story stems from the ...”

“... to Adorno), while Teddie, whom the sociologist Leo Löwenthal described as ‘the pampered young gentleman from a well-to-do family’, was rarely troubled by self-doubt.‘My condition is ghastly,’ Kracauer wrote in his first letter to Adorno:I am so fearful about the transience of what is dearest to me – what to me is the meaning or the ...”

“... but the poem ends:Maybe what they say is trueOf war and war’s alarms;But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.Thomas Mann comes into all this because, in a lightly sardonic spirit, Yeats took as the epigraph to his poem a phrase from Mann which MacLeish had cited on the same page as his account of Yeats’s failure to keep up to ...”

“... elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like ...”

“... A prim and eager young clerk, working for his art-dealer uncle, is writing to his schoolboy brother. Pictures and books are the 19-year-old’s meat and drink: he soon adds Millais, Dickens and George Eliot to his love for Jean-François Millet, when in 1873, Goupil & Co, agents in lithographs, steel engravings and ‘modern paintings’, send him from The Hague to their branch just off the Strand ...”

“... swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to fight. One young woman in the counter-demonstration was murdered by a man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. Dozens ...”

“... General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and son. (‘I won’t go into the fact that you’re the first member of this family to fail any ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”

“... what concentration, effort, agony he must have laboured on these marvellous poems!’ Michael Wharton exclaimed in a review in the Spectator, praise which was prominently reprinted on the jacket of the 1985 Collected Poems to sum up a whole school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter ...”

“... without maps. ‘Guilty but Insane’ was Ian Gilmour’s heading for his Spectator review of Michael Foot and Mervyn Jones, whose Suez book Guilty Men 1956 is still one of the best accounts of the collusion. The Spectator has often made trouble for the Tory leadership, with Iain Macleod’s bean-spiller on ‘The Magic Circle’ being the benchmark ...”

“... that he was a man fatally flawed by egotism, an incorrigible poseur. Erica Cotterill, a strange young adherent with whom he flirted and corresponded for years, told him he was a child acting as a man: ‘can’t you feel that everything of every kind that comes from you, work speeches plays letters ... comes at its root from a pose or attitude of some ...”

“... and illustrated popular accounts of current science that are food and drink for the enquiring young. A dozen topics are considered here that would never have been included in such a book fifteen years ago: the limits to growth, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, the fuel and agriculture crisis of tropical countries, the significance of ...”

“... nine in the whole of Russia). Naturally the family was anti-Bolshevik, and equally naturally, the young Alexander was fed Bolshevik heroism and Revolutionary fervour at school. The resulting social tension Solzhenitsyn himself regards as having conditioned his entire development; it caused him to subordinate the values of personal life to those of public ...”