“... whether it is Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer or the latest colour-mag line-up of the Best of Young British Novelists. Who’s new, who’s hot, who’s good, who’s not going to cut the mustard? The critical triage starts immediately. I remember lining up with my fellow Young Novelists of 1983, and after we had left ...”

“... the work of composition’. Initially at least, theatre wasn’t his main interest: the ambitious young provincial was determined to establish himself as a literary poet, for whom print and court patronage would be the key to success. Catering for the popular tastes of playhouse audiences was something he, like many of his playwright contemporaries, might ...”

“... of writers resist, or try to resist, the by now familiar and formulaic portrait of the artist as a young child: in Thomas’s case, intimidating, overbearing father, worshipped abject mother and sensitive child who only becomes the best version of himself in his writing. Thomas’s life as a boy was nearly half his life – he was killed at 39 – and Wilson ...”

“... what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence’. Williams’s declared enemies in philosophy – ‘reactionaries’ who sweep ...”

“... generation. ‘I saw more fighting,’ he wrote, than Siegfried Sassoon, or Edmund Blunden, or Robert Graves, far more than Liddell Hart, four or five times as much as Wilfred Owen, and I didn’t go home with a nervous breakdown. [But] I fear the damage is done, and the myth of the 1930s has prevailed … When I meet some clever ...”

“... sea, air – gathered. Not long after his death in 1978, Zukofsky was taken up by a group of young writers who referred to themselves as the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. The work of this group was always wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, post-structuralist commentary, and emphasised indeterminism, resistance to ...”

“... Exactly who she was, and whether she existed at all, no one is sure (two possible candidates are a young spy called Anne Marie Lesser, and Elsbeth Schragmuller, a former student at the University of Freiburg). In effect, the Lady Doctor was a blank page on which were inscribed all types of kinkiness. ‘The Frau Doktor, as she was addressed by her ...”

“... in the Megastore who ‘samples’ his signs of identity from its offerings, but as a young journalist-critic who needs to report on it. In 1985 Si Newhouse, the mogul of the Condé Nast media empire (Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair), purchased the New Yorker from its founding family – to scatter some of its aura on his other publications, or so it was ...”

“... from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three years earlier, during a visit to Cambridge, he had posed the puzzle which started Newton on the path to his Principia. What is the orbit of a planet under the influence of an attractive force ...”

“... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...”

“... said that he once stole an armoured car just to take it for a joyride. He was wild when he was young. By the time I knew him he was a genial elderly truck driver who liked to retell his mother’s stories of growing up in a village in Albania, a country he’d never visited. He was a black sheep, but in the eyes of our not very saintly family he’d long ...”

“... 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in ...”

“... comes all the harder for being couched in compassion:I see . . . a confusion – how natural to a young man so isolated – creeping in upon him. Perhaps the aesthetes were right? Perhaps he could retain his good painting and yet satisfy the English thirst for sentimentality? Suppose we get the loveliest woman procurable, and put her in the finest robe ...”

“... began life as anarchists. A group portrait from January 1924 arranges photographs of the young André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and others in a grid around a mugshot of an even more youthful Germaine Berton, an anarchist who assassinated Marius Plateau, editor of the ultra-nationalist Action française. With titles like ‘Open ...”

“... it shared Carthage’s fate, the better. ‘National hatred must sound forth,’ he trumpeted. ‘Young republicans should suck a hatred of the name Englishman with their mother’s milk.’ The English were ‘a populace foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear.’ It seems that he meant this last sentence all too literally, for he ...”