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“... among its impeccable olde London costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic ...”

“... like happy families, are alike? Not quite that perhaps, but the last shot of the film is of the young Chiron sitting on the beach, his back towards us, looking out at the ocean. He sees the moon, and then he turns his head. His wide eyes suggest all the desolation and promise that Juan saw in him at the beginning. If we started again, would things be ...”

“... and more especially the part that they play in American mythologies of success. In Whiplash a young musician at a top (imaginary) New York conservatory wants to be the best drummer in the world, to be a legend or nothing. He despises all other forms of life, and finds his match in his ferocious teacher, played with extraordinary relish by ...”

“... recurring fantasies about sleeping with the girl who comes to clean his flat, has an affair with a young woman, Elena (Daisy Granados), which would be light-hearted for Sergio if he knew how to let go of his irony, and is light-hearted for her until he ditches her. He remembers his schooldays, his first visit to a brothel, an affair with a German girl he ...”

“... old, gendered dreams represented by the dolls. When Robbie on her journey approaches a group of young girls, she simpers and smiles in the way she thinks she is supposed to, and the girls are horrified. They left such dolls behind long ago. One of them calls Robbie a fascist. Again, Robbie should probably not know what this means. But she does, and is ...”

“... aristocratic, always about the business of raising himself and hiding himself, and, from a young age, brilliantly observing Britain from the top of his nose and the summit of Parnassus. From Blackpool in 1942: The best thing about this place is the potted shrimps one can buy for succour between performances! Not really a holiday attraction, of ...”

“... to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like myself from starting a Third World War. Thus although he missed the early, heroic years of the resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field and at headquarters, the growing self-confidence of the Partisans, the increasing ...”

“... as though the fearless child had been chosen to succeed the naked and discredited Emperor (the young Handke first came to attention by his attacks on the Gruppe 47). A logical choice, perhaps. Handke has remained visibly true to himself: tall and lean and unhappy-looking; the glasses, the moustache, the dark clothes; the astonishing rate of output and the ...”

“... cinematic descent into hell. They even agreed on the incredible proposition that the imaginary young patient – Cecily – should be played by Marilyn Monroe. Sartre apparently thought she was the greatest actress in the world. Not least, they agreed on the money: $25,000 was to be Sartre’s fee. That was about all they agreed on. Huston wanted a ...”

“... 1999, we read sentences like these: ‘In this city the old women dress like adolescents and the young women like old women, because this way they get each other’s jobs’; ‘I was very happy in his arms, especially when I thought of all the films we would see together.’ The thing would be to distinguish this posture, if we can, from simple denial of ...”

“... of a priest in Riazan, a provincial city almost two hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, the young Ivan Petrovich seemed destined for the cloth. The only sure path for advancement for Ivan and his brothers was to enrol at the Riazan theological school, and then to attend the local theological seminary. A truly gifted student might later go to the ...”

“... valley; eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of bottles on the pre-dawn commuter train. A young medical student is ordered to make notes on a local painter and madman, a fellow by the name of Strauch. Strauch has the honour of being the first precipitation in fiction of the typical Bernhard bravado and nihilism and savagery. With his intellect and ...”

“... isolation and emptiness, a space where new and old selves can be found and lost. Alex Darken is a young poet whose marriage has broken up, and who has borrowed a cottage in Norfolk in which to lick his wounds. He meets a burnt-out older poet and his young American mistress, and the foreseeable passions and conflicts ...”

“... has dinner with a couple from another story (about the husband discovering the corpse of a young woman), and in yet another story he treats a child who has been hit by a car. The child’s parents are the neighbours of an aging jazz singer and her difficult, cello-playing daughter. Both families have their pool cleaned by a character in another story ...”

“... his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did live, worked hard and happily, and got engaged. Then he died. His fiancée visited the hospital to thank ...”