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“... for plundering of ships on the Spanish main. The jury found us guilty and we are condemned to die. Young men, a warning take by me, and shun all piracy. No doubt the judge told them, before he passed sentence, that they were enemies of mankind (hostis humani generis in legal Latin); but he would not have told them that they were outlaws without the right to a ...”

“... French soldiers were sent to snuff out jihadism but they found ex-slaves and former masters, young rebels and gerontocrats, smugglers of cigarettes and petrol, vast communities of the unemployed. The list is long. That some of them, torn between grievances and greed, were also terrorists is no surprise, but the French couldn’t tell them ...”

“... to say, a three-quarter inch replica in painted gold, which I at once passed on to the next pretty young woman I met to hang on her charm bracelet. The relevant correlative? A little ethnic gesture to catch another little ethnic vote. In a word, politics. What I now sardonically call my memory flew next to a neighbouring State where another gentleman of Irish ...”

“... does Privy Councillor Goethe need to do that?’ Right, I’ll tell you – why does he make young Werther put a bullet through his head? Because – and this can be proved – Goethe himself was on the brink of suicide, so in order to rid himself of the temptation he makes Werther do it for him! You see? He goes on living, but it’s the same as if ...”

“... to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as ...”

“... in Schull, County Cork. Presumably it was a financial blow when his father died, but Synge was too young to feel a difference, and besides there was enough money coming from rented estates in Wicklow. The Synges were landlord-class, with the mentality that went with such privilege. As a young man, John thought himself some ...”

“... view of human nature taken by philosophical political activists (starry-eyed when they are young) who set going the machinery of revolution. There is obvious truth in this, but the lesson is hypocritical when used to justify the rapacious opportunists of the Open Market economy on the grounds that their system is ‘human nature’. The good luck which ...”

“... couldn’t have envisaged. The Nation’s and New Age’s subscribers, Fabian Society members, young students drawn towards socialism, admirers of Shaw or of Arnold Bennett were, if not exactly the same people, at least fluent speakers of the same political and cultural dialects. They formed an essentially cohesive left-wing intellectual class which ...”

“... conclusion was foregone and the trial – of Socrates for inculcating unofficial ideas in the young; of the white men arraigned before an all-white Mississippi jury for the abduction and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till; of Sir Walter Raleigh for an imaginary treason – simply a public enunciation and endorsement of it. That at least is what we ...”

“... idiom, he was essentially a verist. In fact, his whole quarrel with the operatic stage of his young manhood, which he knew all too well from galley years as chorus master and musical director in more or less decrepit opera houses from Würzburg to Riga, was precisely that it was weighed down by convention and artifice (I’ve always loved his description ...”

“... the wannest of smiles, nowadays, to greet the announcement that the Arts Council is subsidising a young artist to make piles of rubbish in the ‘back streets’ of Bootle? Mrs Huxley trades too much on the comic stereotypes of the English scene, and only in a splendidly disorganised ‘Bed Race’ towards the end of the novel does her satire strike a ...”

“... a looming food security problem. Africa was the obvious target: a continent of one billion mostly young inhabitants – two billion by 2050 – and 60 per cent of the earth’s uncultivated land, plus one third of its mineral riches. The aftermath of the Cold War allowed Beijing to come in with a low bid for Africa. In the early 1990s, after the demise of the ...”

“... in his own being gave him the certainty that he contained millions, the whole swarming body of young America. ‘Your very flesh shall be a great poem,’ he wrote in 1855 in the Preface to Leaves of Grass, ‘not only in its words but ... in every motion and joint of your body.’ Including the penis, if you happened to be a man – ‘This poem drooping ...”

“... these answers can be found at the back of the book. It is a deeply duplicitous thing to teach our young, many of whom will grow up assuming that the principles of the school text apply to their entire life and all its problems. It is contrary to the scientific method, for in science, as in life, there can be no assurance that a question has an answer. If we ...”

“... tense is often used to add immediacy to childhood memoirs and to dramatise the trials of being young: not ‘I felt bad’ but ‘Woe is me’. Here it’s more inclusive – a stab at empathy and a recognition (available only in retrospect) that adults are human, too. ‘You know who’ll miss her most?’ Frayn’s father howls, between the departure of ...”