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“... in; and a few emotional dramas in which he backs away from formula. ‘The Cruise of the Jolly Roger’ is about a career army man who fails to die in battle then buys a boat which he sails aimlessly from place to place, waiting for his life to end; the story makes plain the disorienting, narrative-destroying nature of war. The morally ambiguous ‘The ...”

“... wake it up Deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Raine and Amis are of the same generation (young), and of the same university, and their careers in literary journalism have intertwined. They are held to belong to a coterie which has been termed – embarrassingly for them, doubtless – the New Oxford Wits. Given a degree of literary fraternity, there ...”

“... the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual. ‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would ...”

“... in which the likes of Kim Philby were likely to thrive. For the two changes worked together: the young intellectual recruits as a class tended to feel contemptuous, even angry, at their elders’ continuing obsession with the Bolshevik menace to the virtual exclusion of the threat posed by the Nazis. One of the most interesting passages in Glees’s book is ...”

“... full Commonwealth status after independence; should the island ‘be the RAC or Boodles’? When Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, exulted to Macmillan that they had arrested the spy John Vassall, the prime minister complained that this was the wrong approach: ‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of ...”

“... drove the swelling tide of revolution. Reading of them now, one is inevitably reminded of the young Russians of the same period and their excited dabblings in what their counterparts in the 1960s would call ‘alternative lifestyles’. Foster cites ‘feminism, socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-vivisectionism’ as beliefs impelling the revolutionary ...”

“... in Nothing if not Critical (1990), he deplores the neglect of English art, blaming (among others) Roger Fry, who, with Clive Bell, ‘made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde’: for them ‘any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid’ was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another ...”

“... Powell’s cover offers the title, True Colours, red on black, and a photograph of a shirtless young man, nipples to crotch, head and legs out of the picture, his Lee Cooper jeans undone and hanging well below the navel. The blurb recommends the ‘movingly elegiac’ sequence ‘A Cooling Universe’. It consists of 15 formal sonnets in which the last ...”

“... begins to teach himself algebra and geometry in his seventies; and the marvellous, irrepressible young H.G. himself, the refugee from the draper’s counter, with his head full of a ‘loose headlong panorama of all history, science and literature’, born just late enough to hook himself, by his own efforts, into an education. Nothing in the rest of ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... Larkin’s closeted artiness to Amis’s knockabout style. Sometimes, as when he writes of the young Amis being viewed as ‘almost charismatic’, apparent bitchiness turns out to be a side effect of an awkward way with words. Elsewhere he seems as appalled as any taste-shaping puritan by Amis’s boozing and shagging. And after a while it’s hard not to ...”

“... supplies of espresso. They might have been less familiar with the groups of casually attired young men and women, who occasionally pulled off their jackets to reveal guns resting in their holsters. ‘The Mafia as we have known it for one hundred and fifty years is dead,’ Orlando announced, restlessly drawing diagrams on the blotting paper in front of ...”

“... An inspired detail – a blob of pink under the ear – lifts the whole image. It is the work of a young but not immature artist: Bell had studied and exhibited, and following the death of her father in 1904 had lived in much greater freedom with her siblings in Gordon Square. She married Clive Bell in 1907; when she painted Sydney-Turner her first ...”

“... marriage in ‘Modern Manners’, a poem first published in 1799 and reprinted recently by Roger Lonsdale in his Oxford anthology of Eighteenth Century Women Poets, she took for granted that the most direct route to separate property was to marry for money and chuck the husband. In ‘former times’, according to a speaker named Flirtilla, ‘hearts ...”

“... her, we see him, out of focus, emerge from the dust of the bomb-blast. The shot is well framed – Roger Pratt deserves his Oscar nomination for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of ...”