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“... Reading Santayana, one has little sense of change or development. He was an old youngster and a young ancient. As a young man, his writings sometimes have the feeling of premature wisdom, beyond precocity: how could anyone so young have known what he knew? As an old man, he retained a ...”

“... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...”

“... novels. A few have achieved the status of bona fide classics: W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It was the last two of those novels I kept thinking of as I read Chad Harbach’s highly ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the ...”

“... ruins became teaching aids in a series of lectures on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he studies in Islamic Architecture have an overt function – whether prayer, teaching, interment or pleasure – yet ...”

“... an individual psychology, words alone can sometimes be expected to do too much. No Country for Young Men is simultaneously about 1979 and 1921. James Duffy has come to Dublin to make a programme about Sparky Driscoll, a fellow American killed long ago in the Troubles. Another way back to the death of Driscoll is through the scattered wits of Sister ...”

“... than a voluminously chatty novel – a roman à clef – about high society. A rejoinder that the young Proust once made to Anatole France, the old master on whom Bergotte was chiefly modelled, is revealing in this context. The famous writer who admired him, and who in 1896 had written a preface for the young Proust’s ...”

“... cheating on Strachey’s part, but he does refer to another which is worse. Manning’s wife died young in 1837 of tuberculosis, that scourge of the Victorian era. He was deeply distressed. ‘How could he have guessed,’ wrote Strachey, ‘that one day he would come to number that loss among “God’s special mercies”?’ The implication clearly being ...”

“... Boys and Dead Girls’ Mary Gordon identifies the ‘American innocent’. She tracks him – young, restless and bad news for women – through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. ‘All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search ...”

“... the ghosts in accordance with the moral ailments that afflicted their lives. Roger Bevins III, a young gay man who committed suicide, appears covered in eyes, noses and hands, a nod to the sensualist he became in the moments after he slit his wrists. A printer called Hans Vollman, killed by a falling roof beam hours before he planned to bed his ...”

“... a desire to read further: On May 15, 1796, General Bonaparte entered Milan at the head of that young army which had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valour and genius Italy had witnessed in a few months wakened a slumbering nation ... Soon new and ...”

“... very unhappy. The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from ...”

“... no doubt partly because birth control was now making children more scarce. The 1880s also saw Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, not to mention the remarkable growth of the Boys’ Own Paper. And not only was literature being specially produced for children: children were at last being seen as ...”

“... own face and you could peer through the Devil’s own image at the black chadors and serious-faced young men of central Tehran. The effect was curious: whenever a stroller purchased a mask and held it to his face, the young men would cry ‘Death to the Shah’ with a special intensity. It was as if the cardboard actually ...”

“... out of other Murdoch novels: Hattie, the granddaughter, a doll-like ‘pure child’; the pair of young (suspected) homosexuals; the parish priest with his 20th-century brand of heresy (‘What is necessary is the absolute denial of God’). Along with character-types, a stream of familiar-looking baggage flows on from novel to novel: Japanese netsuke, flying ...”