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“... rather as Elisabeth in Siblings brings painting. The Stasi got in touch, sending her an appealing young man to conduct a four-hour interview, the meaning of which she didn’t understand for several weeks afterwards. When her husband was put in prison for six months for resisting arrest and hitting a policeman, she was slow to see the connection or the ...”

“... water with death and recalling Baudelaire’s poem, where Death is a ship’s captain and not a young man. The poet tells him it’s time to leave: ‘Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre!’ There is an Ophelia complex too. A quotation from Hamlet is taken as an invitation to imagine a ‘creature born to die in water’, ‘the woman ...”

“... that the experience had determined him to devote his life to music rather than medicine, ‘like a young man born to be a sailor who, having seen only the little boats on the lakes of his native mountains, found himself suddenly transported to a three-deck ship on the high seas’. It is no surprise that Berlioz’s full conversion took place after hearing a ...”

“... to undermine any attempt by the Labour Government to maintain trade links with the Russians. The young President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, was committed to maintaining these links. His trips to Russia, and especially his plans to sell old aircraft to the Russians, were more than once sabotaged by MI5. The ...”

“... barmaid at The Horse and Groom where he has so often been manic or depressive. Before long he has young, polyandrous Virginia in his dead father’s bleak house and she has learned to cite the Book of Ruth, saying: ‘I have washed and anointed myself. Spread your skirt over me.’ All goes merry as a marriage-bell. Never was a tale of depression less ...”

“... in the warrior bands of the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded Rome. The military service of young aristocrats in a lord’s household coincides with the beginnings of vassalage as described by Bloch, originating in an atmosphere heavy with the odour of household bread. The world of chivalry was a world where men were linked to each other by strong ...”

“... studies (while her brother forged ahead) and longed for adventure. In 1924, she joined the German Young Communists’ League and was coshed by a policeman at a demo. Her disapproving parents found her a job in a bookshop, where she was allowed to dust the books but not read them. At nineteen, she joined the KPD, read Die Rote Fahne and kept a Luger hidden ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... on which the American paedophiliac liberationist David Sonnenschien gives advice: ‘Most very young or small kids cannot and should not be penetrated by an adult penis or a dildo. Sometimes a finger is OK, but even with a finger lubrication is recommended. And watch those fingernails!’ On a purely utilitarian calculation the actions imagined here could ...”

“... one point co-founding the Harvill Press. Flora’s husband, a Boys Own Paper sort of chap crippled young by a kick from his horse, was obliquely immortalised by W.H. Auden: Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by ...”

“... need, ‘that very open, honest manner which is never to be trusted’, as Melbourne advised the young Queen Victoria. O’Connell compared Peel’s smile to the silver plate on a coffin. Samuel’s ‘sense of humour’, Beatrice Webb noted, ‘takes the irritating form of tactless irony at the expense of the people he is talking to’. It is a feat to have ...”

“... to him keep shifting. We can’t feel the same way about the weird old man as we do about the shy young dandy, particularly when the dandy is so clearly the guy who lost his wife in the 15th century. And yet we do know it is the same person: given to endless, tender bereavement, fuelled by his finding in Jonathan Harker’s fiancée Mina a replica of his dead ...”

“... It is lifted out, suspended, musing, as in ‘A Morning in Vicenza’: The sun was so fragile, so young, that we were a little scared; a careless move might scratch it, just a shout – if anyone had tried – might do it harm; only the rushing swifts, with wings hard as cast-iron, were free to sing out loud, because they’d spent their brief, uneasy ...”

“... book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national director of the YMHA asked that some possibly libellous references be removed from the manuscript; Seidel refused; the prize was revoked, the original ...”

“... life surely did its bit. An old man, ‘nothing but skin and bones’, offers to carry the young man’s suitcase for 30 centavos. This seems steep to our hero and they settle on three: The old man . . . hung the sandals he was wearing around his neck, loaded the suitcase on his shoulder with a strength that was unbelievable for his bones, and ran like ...”