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“... in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at last. But reading his letters in a new century makes the brave efforts at sexual enlightenment seem sadder than they once did, while ...”

“... Lindsay’s contribution to Declaration, an anthology of protest pieces by the so-called Angry Young Men. Coming back to Britain is, in many respects, like going back to the nursery. The outside world, the dangerous world, is shut away; its sounds muffled. Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of the Queen and her fairytale ...”

“... to set a page; a boy moistens paper to ensure it will hold ink; a printer tugs at a hand-press; a young man places the freshly printed sheets, still wet with ink, on a ceiling rack to dry; a young woman enters with a huge jug of beer (errors were often blamed on ‘printers’ wine’); and surveying it all is the master ...”

“... of Budapest. In 1988, Orbán was one of the founders of a dissident group called the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz). ‘Young’ was meant literally: nobody over 35 was allowed to join. Its members – mostly law students, mostly from the countryside – were libertarians who admired Margaret Thatcher. In ...”

“... were more than mass-hypnotic ephemera. I have to state an interest here: early on in my career a young director working on The South Bank Show who knew me made a film about my work. Bragg came to my house and interviewed me for the programme. But despite this connection, I’m still as surprised as any other long-term Bragg-watcher by quite how much I like ...”

“... and in eloquence, and introduced him into the court as sewer-extraordinary in 1516, aged 13. The young Wyatt had fortune on his side. He was handsome (‘there was no prettier man at court than he’), a virtuosic horseman, quick to pick up languages, and clever beyond all his contemporaries. He glittered. In his youth, according to George Wyatt, Thomas ...”

“... or indeed luckier, than Wren. While his uncle was in the Tower for recalcitrant royalism, the young scholar nevertheless got support from several of Cromwell’s kinsmen. The Lord Protector burst into one dinner to offer a deal for the prisoner’s release, and was in any case soon persuaded to help Wren himself to a prestigious professorship in ...”

“... tutor – though he has become a Russian count. Isabelle, the heroine of The Thinking Reed, is young, exceedingly beautiful, ‘nearly exceedingly rich’, tragically widowed. She hunts the wild boar, her underwear is made to measure, her first lover ‘was not less beautiful as a man than she was as a woman’. As a novelist, Rebecca West liked to write ...”

“... of Empson’s bags that he decided to report him to the college authorities. Next morning the young poet and critic was summoned before the senior dons and accused of concealing ‘sexual machinery’ in his luggage. Empson received his marching orders, and the best that his mentor I.A. Richards, also a fellow of Magdalene, could do was to fix him up with ...”

“... with ease – a quality he admired in Romilly? Or was it his fear of death, so intense when he was young and conquered only when he came to die? Or was it some extension of his ego? All novelists are egoists who spin their characters from observing themselves as much as other people and choose subject-matter from their experience. But Philip Toynbee’s ego ...”

“... Dr Banfield cheers up, as well he might, when he gets to the newer generation of the 1920s, with young Willie Walton not fitting into the Prince Consort Road, and then with Benjamin Britten, who can be seen as the equivalent of the Thirties poets. The study (too long for its subject, but full of interesting insights) stops before English music was dragged ...”

“... of it. Bernal’s decision to make his career in England was nothing extraordinary. A promising young crystallographer might take the same decision just as easily today. The political rhetoric (whether Nationalist or Loyalist) according to which London and Dublin are conceived as ‘foreign powers’ is doubtless diplomatically correct. But I would guess ...”

“... his wife Katherine had no fewer than 12 children, though four of their daughters died tragically young in an epidemic which finally induced the family to forsake Arran. Their two younger sons deservedly get chapters to themselves in The Macmillans. Mr Daniel and Mr Alexander were the founders of the family firm. They made their way to London via ...”

“... Strane with her therapist; she trusts that nobody else will understand. ‘It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him,’ she explains in a summary introduction that primes the reader for a lengthy statement of denial.Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could ...”

“... As​ a young researcher applying for a US visa to go to a conference in the mid-1960s, I presented myself at the fortress-like embassy in Grosvenor Square and ticked the boxes affirming that I was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party and did not intend to attempt to overthrow the US government by force ...”