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“... of religious truths to a dispersed public audience from the emotional intimacy dramatised in Young’s Night Thoughts. (The ‘Mr Fairly’ with whom Fanny Burney had what is for Guest a paradigmatic conversation about Young at Court in the 1780s was Col. Stephen Digby, the Queen’s ...”

“... He argues, for instance, that Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are autobiographical novels of a broadly similar kind, dependent for intelligibility on a knowledge of their biographical contexts and sources, and less good than Dickens’s earlier version of the same thing: ‘Neither book is as variegated and ...”

“... Eribo or Ribot, an advertising writer by day and a drummer by night, unsuccessfully pursues the young heiress Vivian Smith-Corona Alvarez de Real; a large number of sensationally beautiful women, Magalena and Irenita and Livia and Laura and Mirtila and especially the super-luscious Cuba Venegas, strut their stuff; it seems remarkably easy to fondle their ...”

“... interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to ...”

“... But although his air of superiority, or his superiority, annoyed or hurt some people when he was young in Cambridge and Ceylon, and later as well, he obviously grew much more tolerant as time went on, as befitted his adherence to socialist doctrines which he might call peculiar but which seem entirely honourable, sincere and considered. Still, there remained ...”

“... the fastest crossing, which the Lusitania snatched from the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907. I was too young to remember the loss of White Star’s Titanic, but not too young to remember the torpedoing in 1915 of the Lusitania. Wars end with a forfeiture and redistribution not only of cities but of floating cities. So, in ...”

“... writing at the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their biography, thirty years ago, but it is ...”

“... to them. This tactic of self-subsuming has worked for other writers, but in the hands of the young Merrill, in ‘The Broken Bowl’ for example, it produces verse that is impacted and evasive: The splinters rainbowing ruin on the floor Cut structures in the air, Mark off, like eyes or compasses, a face Of mathematic fixity, spotlight Within whose ...”

“... And time has not falsified yet Was always a love with three corners    I loved you in bed with young men, Your arousers and foils and adorers    Who would yield to me then. And so on, for 25 stanzas, unambiguous about the preferences of the parties, but also firm that the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise ...”

“... Interpretation of Literature’. This belittling tag, coined in a 1988 essay of the same name by Stephen Parrish, general editor of the monumental Cornell Wordsworth, reflected two more widespread beliefs in literary theory: that ‘language is prior to thought’ and that authorial intention is ‘not only elusive and illusory, but irrelevant’. In the ...”

“... and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing to the wall where the ...”

“... the Library forecourt, its windows plastered with appeals for information. Inside, three or four young policemen are sitting looking bored, fiddling with their handcuffs and CS gas canisters. The one sitting opposite the door points me on my way and suggests that if I need further help I should ask one of the coppers lining the route between the Library and ...”

“... possessing an imaginative life of their own. Ariès points out how Medieval artists portrayed the young Jesus as a small adult: they did not know how to illustrate childhood in any other way. From the studies so far published, it seems that only in the late 18th century did childhood come to seem important in itself; for some, it became an ideal upon which to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... least its main cities – had been engulfed in an ‘epidemic of suicide’, especially among the young. In the 1880s, educated opinion, always ready to blame any malaise on the government, saw the supposed suicide epidemic as a social pathology – ‘degeneration’ was the word most often used. Newspapers gave generous coverage to suicides, and Dostoevsky ...”