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“... happy it seems, with his adult nose pressed against the window of his bomber. Unfortunately, most young children expend this mimic genius in coming to look like their mothers or, even worse, their fathers, and most elderly people use it up in the act of becoming their children. Colin Osman is a retired gentleman who lives in Cockfosters. His plumage is white ...”

“... I find it too distressing to write down what the case means to me, when so many people believe the young man is simply a lost cause, a person in the grip of evil. The papers have been ringing asking for comment: the messages go to voicemail. Outside, buses pass in quick succession, the passengers reading their newspapers and seeming very sure of ...”

“... Before she was born, Sylvia Townsend Warner was called Andrew. When she was seven, her mother took against her for failing to be pretty and failing to be male; by the time she was 17 she was known to the boys of Harrow, where her father was a master, as ‘the cleverest fellow we had’. She described herself as repelled by the ‘devouring femaleness’ of her mother and as owning a ‘preponderantly masculine’ intellect ...”

“... took place despite the potent opposition of Oswald’s sisters-in-law, who were caring for Andrew and Stephen. Elsa insisted on being called ‘mummy’. ‘Never call that German woman what you called your own mother,’ an aunt had insisted. Guilt and treachery thus informed the children’s first dealings with their stepmother, complicated by ...”

“... At​ the rehearsals for Cinderella, the choreographer was clapping out the beat while ten young dancers jumped and twirled. It was a festival of Nike socks, North Face joggers, Calvin Klein T-shirts and scooped up hair. It wasn’t a Glasgow I’m accustomed to seeing. The hall was littered with pumpkins, baskets of apples, a trolley with three geese sticking out of it ...”

“... that summer. And what was happening, really, was drugs, the new drugs soon to be taken up by young people in every corner of Britain. Saville has always been an interlocutor, not a preacher, and his designs of this period underscore and eventually describe a new mood in the country’s towns and fields and underpasses.The actual leaves used for the ...”

“... flying about their heads they ride into a wood: We rode in single file and shortly passed two young men, bare-chested in the sun-dappled shade, one sitting with his back to the trunk of a tree, the other sprawled upon the ground, arms covering his face, bright hair bunched against the brown earth. Both were lazily humming, their scarlet jackets dangling ...”

“... and, in retrospect, boring and pointless: all that matters is that the management and our editor, Andrew Neil, told us nothing of their true intentions. By contrast, the crisis itself was simple. Rupert Murdoch demanded a level of compulsory redundancies of his Sogat 82 and NGA employees that he knew they would not accept. The two unions took the bait and on ...”

“... reading and manipulating the market. The degree of overlap between Benjamin Rask in the novel and Andrew Bevel in the memoir is for the reader to assess as the book goes on, though not a great deal has been done to bring curiosity to the boil, or even above room temperature.Benjamin Rask, an only child born in the 1870s, is the heir to a long-established ...”

“... palpable relief that we’re finally turning to more engaging topics: the rights and wrongs of Andrew and Harry. Not everyone has succumbed: there are still rationalist anti-monarchists criticising us for trivialising our discourse with unwholesome royal gossip. They’ve been making the same objections for two hundred years; indeed ...”

“... gab and gags, with men slagging their mothers-in-law and keening to ride (or ‘roide’) brassy young girls. That’s the way Doyle’s men think of women and that’s the way his women think of men and that’s the kind of writer he is. No one writing fiction is better than Doyle at uncovering life inside council houses and getting at the buzz on ...”

“... to a series of silly, deluded tributes to the ‘working man’, to ‘real men’, to ‘young East End and Essex people’, to nameless old men ‘puffing on a soggy Woodbine, faces pinched and quenched by life’; the sort of man ‘who walked the Northern streets with his delicate whippet at his side’. Changes are on the way that will make the ...”

“... of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ‘proliferation of hordes of infants, children, youths and young men and women on the unpaved and unlit streets of the smoky, industrial “frontier” towns’ – frenetically expending what energy they could muster before life closed in on them. Things could only get better. Despite the forcefulness of Edwin Chadwick ...”

“... the present selection is full of the kind of youth-mongering that appears to slide naturally into young-fogeyism. You won’t find David and Nikos smoking the hard stuff with Mick and Keith. Plante is living out the fantasy of being a Jamesian personality in Europe and would be more likely to swoon at the sight of Frances Partridge than, say, Jimi Hendrix. We ...”

“... were smiling and waving frantically. I wasn’t entirely separated from my family: my brother Andrew, three years older than me, had been admitted to the hospital a few days after me. He had been called back from his school in Dublin when I was diagnosed and Claud met him at Cork railway station. ‘I really thought that all might be well up to the very ...”