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“... from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New York salonnier of the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten, who shamelessly made sure his name was associated with those he helped. Thayer had some literary ...”

“... Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could find enough of them.) One anonymous writer, here rescued from oblivion, divined that Eliot’s aim ...”

“... recently saved a further colleague, Victor Pasmore, from court martial for desertion by leaning on Kenneth Clark to vouch for him as ‘one of the six best painters in England’, but artistically the two were by now on very different tacks. More urgently, there was now no woman, or prospect of a woman, left to give focus to Coldstream’s life. Four years ...”

“... appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men thrusting their way through wartime Whitehall, where he made a name for himself with his prodigious memory and command of statistics. After entering Parliament for Labour in 1945 and becoming the youngest cabinet minister in more than a century, Wilson ...”

“... have been regularly rethought. The only constant, as one former census bureau director, Kenneth Prewitt, admitted, is that they are ‘never politically neutral’. For example, the category of ‘Free Coloured Persons’ was introduced in 1820 largely because pro-slavery apologists were determined to prove that freedom made former slaves ...”

“... but older certainly than Heseltine’s. And Alan, moreover, was the son of a celebrated aesthete, Kenneth Clark, whose cultivated snootiness made the cash seem older than it was. And as to his son’s personal credentials: who could fault them? He went to Eton and to Oxford, he lived in a castle stuffed with priceless paintings, he owned garage-loads of ...”

“... municipal scallywags like Derek Hatton. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are all very well for the young, but the real pleasure of middle age is schadenfreude. Sometimes, when one looks back at the long line of Thatcher’s villains, one has to concede that, however much one disliked Thatcher’s triumphalism at the time, one could hardly wish the battle to ...”

“... the further four million under that age classed as ‘near poor’, adds up to a quarter of all young Americans. These people will be coming into the labour force in four or five years’ time with all the disadvantages of their early lives, including, as Luttwak emphasises, what is indisputably the poorest education now provided for any children anywhere ...”

“... could see exhibitions of the work of Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso or Matisse and the work of their young British followers was not the Tate Gallery, which was hostile to Post-Impressionist work, certainly not the Royal Academy, and not the Hayward Gallery, which did not exist: it was the three small rooms of the Leicester Galleries which are described by ...”

“... of expanding student numbers on the cheap. But by then unemployment had risen steeply, and the young had been exposed to the Thatcherite doctrine-that the main purpose of a university education was to make it easier to get a job when you left. The new policy of university expansion coincided, more or less, with the introduction of the National Curriculum ...”

“... I’ve had it packed for a week now’) as well as her unhappiness. Welles’s own mother died young (or youngish – she was 42), but she wasn’t a victim. Daughter of a prosperous Illinois coal merchant, Beatrice Welles was handsome, dynamic and indefatigably improving, reading her son Shakespeare ‘before he could speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac ...”

“... pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin ...”

“... annexe at Christchurch Priory in Dorset nonetheless represents Marston as a bearded and beruffed young man sitting with a balder companion in front of two tankards of ale. Sadly, today’s visual shorthand for ‘morally intense Jacobean playwright who took holy orders’, even in the church where he prayed for a quarter of a century, is just ‘bloke in pub ...”

“... Latin prose he also praised. And there were active Latinists elsewhere as well. In the 1930s, the young Viennese scholar Ernst Gombrich wrote charming, playful compositions in medieval Latin. Even now eager students stream to programmes like those of the Paideia Institute, where they not only read but speak, sing and rap in Latin while on summer courses in ...”