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“... claim allegiance.’ For all the affected stateliness of his early prose, Duncan became known as a young man for stirring up mostly benign mayhem. Marjorie McKee, his partner for a brief and disastrous experiment in heterosexual marriage, said he ‘could stand chaos better than anyone I knew’, and Jarnot shows that much of the chaos was of his own ...”

“... of those who were once thought part of Labour’s natural constituency – the social underdogs. Young working-class males are more likely to go to jail under Labour; they are more likely to be excluded from school; their parents are more likely to be judged incompetent; their style of life is more likely to be thought socially dysfunctional; and the ...”

“... he was better than his circumstances had made him. After Cambridge, he did what many intelligent young men without money would do, and became a clergyman, eased into modest preferment by influential relatives. Another uncle, Jaques Sterne, an affluent and worldly churchman, with whom he would later quarrel, was a considerable help in the early years. But ...”

“... We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for example, Hoggart ...”

“... to celebrate its rebuilding. Brave Enterprise was written by the theatre’s publicist, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, who had moved to Stratford in 1925, after being appointed drama critic of the Stratford Herald on the recommendation of his famous second cousin, G.K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 in South Africa, where his father supervised a gold mine, A.K. had ...”

“... of afterglow or mark left behind by one’s ancestors. It is as if, to paraphrase a formula of Kenneth Burke’s, words are not simply the signs of things but rather, and to a crucial degree, things are themselves the signs of words. A densely suggestive passage early in the book is meant to hint at these possibilities, and particularly at the child’s ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... banal information she purveys, and Sandy would not have had such a finely calibrated ear if the young Humphries had not first embraced the culture of far-off Europe in its most refined, preferably decadent forms. When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously ...”

“... in her poetry: it is her craftsmanship that is paid the sincerest compliment in the words of the young poet today. The drama she made of herself goes into the museum of legend, the vivid fictions live on. Alvarez himself rightly forecast the ‘new areas of experience’ which would result from poetry exploring its own sorts of fiction in its own ways. But ...”

“... married in 1915. Moses brought the same erotic energy to civil service reform. He was one of those young men whose pulse could be set racing by a new system of classifying government jobs. He embarked on a huge reclassification project, drawing up a detailed plan for making promotions on a grading system based on merit – a move calculated to outrage the ...”

“... later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on the young prince was regarded resentfully by right-wing intellectuals; one of them would later complain that Akihito had contracted a spiritual and intellectual ‘fungus’ from his tutor.His father, Hirohito, was never an active war commander or strategist, but ...”

“... Labour’s Minister of Education, told the Association of Education Committees in 1968, ‘for young people to know the facts about Vietnam than it is to know all the details of the Wars of the Roses.’ These modernising tendencies were very much to the fore in CSE, the school-leaving examination introduced in 1964 with the aim of giving every ...”

“... wake the American Left (a summons answered in the enthusiastic endorsements of, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith, the reporter Neil Sheehan and the historian Sean Wilentz). The antagonist he explicitly argues with most often is his fellow philo-American of British origins, Paul Johnson (once on the Left, then Thatcherite, now an admirer of Tony ...”

“... in the language of advertising, her professional world: Imagine taking home this beautiful young pale-skinned blackhaired late-model Jewess. Into fitness, healthy living. Raised good in better Yonkers. Mother a Hebrew School teacher, which means for her a traditional education. Father a chief risk officer for an energy provider in the ...”