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“... to have been participants or contemporary observers, or at least infants, in 1956. Except for Michael Korda’s lively memory of an Oxford undergraduate jaunt, they are historically serious and not only recollect but analyse emotion in tranquillity. Victor Sebestyen’s Twelve Days is well documented, based on up to date knowledge, and vividly ...”

“... add up to, what your aunt’s position in the world means. You could (and do) know that your young friend lacks culture, needs to broaden her horizon by travel. You could (and later do) know that she is ill. You could (and do) know that you yourself are ill. You could (and nearly everybody in the book does) know a particular fact or set of facts, a ...”

“... a ‘sickly haze of pot smoke’. The fact that hippies are – like the superannuated Neil in The Young Ones – no longer the force they were does not pacify Holbrook. The poison is still coursing deep in England’s veins. McInerney (who was five years old in 1960) is the leading connoisseur with Bret Easton Ellis (who was not born in 1960) of a Nineties ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”

“... For a hero, Alderman Roberts may be lacking in style. ‘A cautious, thrifty fellow’ is how Hugo Young describes him and it’s easy to tell he isn’t impressed. But Alfred Roberts was an imposing figure in Grantham and his businesses worked at a time when a great many failed. What we chiefly know of his wife, the elusive Beatrice, is that her daughter ...”

“... Although precocious in that there are poems here which must have been written when Mahon was as young as 20 or 21, he looks as if he has been compensating for a lack of productivity by going over earlier work once again. Form and style in contemporary poetry are of course, highly contentious matters. There are celebrated poets who appear to have no idea ...”

“... Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood* there is a photograph of him as a little boy young enough to be in a frock, which was probably among the photographs he happened to look at through an old stereoscope, surprising himself into saying what a dear little fellow he had been. Quite astonishingly, it has the same lift of the head and the same ...”

“... their now abandoned ages’. The novel starts out, as I have said, with the shocking death of a young woman in the arms of her would-be lover. They have had dinner, have gone to bed and begun to undress, the woman just gets sick and dies among the foreplay. The child with the aeroplane above his head is asleep in another room. The lover, our narrator, tries ...”

“... Yemenis begging or selling anything they can at traffic lights has shot up, and groups of kids and young men hang around the streets or play football in any available space till midnight. (The space where a month ago teenagers kicked up so much thick dust in their game that they magically vanished into it like phantoms is now a lake.) Very little street ...”

“... have the scars to show for it’. He is doubtless thinking of his earlier novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), and two collections of stories, Unions (1911) and Three Women (1924). Perhaps also of his plays, The Enthusiasts (1921) and Vinzenz and the Girlfriend of Important Men (1924), and a great many articles and essays. He would like now to ...”

“... something very much more – accept the fact that this may never be? And if there was once, when young, a romantic wish to die, and a courting of death, what then? Will there be guilt, and a dark attempt to shift the blame?’ These are not real questions. Long before we can dial through to Ontario and press our own special insights on the author, the ...”

“... world very different from any my aunt would have recognised. I saw a good deal of her while I was young because, during the war and then again after my parents divorced, I was largely brought up by my paternal grandparents in the wicked town of Maidenhead. I didn’t know it was wicked until later when I read the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick ...”

“... part because of the end of Russian influence. But ‘the street’ is volatile. Those millions of young men, city migrants, many with little behind them and less ahead, unemployed even when they have some training or a degree, and forming with their sisters a high percentage of the population of Arab societies, are a constant source of unease to ...”