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“... it, all for the same reasons. Diane Arbus loved Freaks. She watched it ‘innumerable times’, Arthur Lubow writes in his biography, ‘often introducing people she knew to its pleasures’. ‘She said she had to see it every time it played,’ one of those friends recalled. As a photographer, Arbus liked taking pictures of those whom others believed to ...”

“... the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week when I was rung by the Independent (journalist’s name forgotten) wanting my comments on a movement for Yorkshire independence. I say I have ...”

“... ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He recommended the young and unpublished Patricia Highsmith to Yaddo in 1948. In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the ...”

“... In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This ...”

“... effect of piano playing on this ordinary girl: ‘disjoined from her music-stool, [she] was only a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face.’ As yet she doesn’t live as she plays, but Mr Beebe is, of course, prescient. Much later in his life, Forster, speculating whimsically about the future of some of his ...”

“... to be politicians as poets, or indeed judges or bishops, lords or commoners, men of influence or young unknowns; and any single individual might fulfil more than one of these roles. Arnold’s social experience was certainly not confined to the society of other intellectuals, still less of other ‘educationists’: one of the works of reference most ...”

“... in 1935, when Michael Foot, just down from Oxford, was his local Labour candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal precursor of the post-war scholarship boy, and in his first term joined both the University Socialist Club and the student ...”

“... that I had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did ...”

“... had survived the war and its nature underlines the degree to which she identified with the dead young men she wrote about in her autobiography Testament of Youth, which covers the years from her birth in 1893 until her marriage in 1925, but is centrally concerned with her experiences during the Great War, after which she felt herself ‘a haphazard survivor ...”

“... Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in 1925 drank hard liquor out of teapots in speakeasies; or danced – danced, danced, danced! – often in a ...”

“... Origo offers this sage advice to those embarking on a career in the life-writing trade: The young biographer who has upon his desk his first intriguing pile of papers, will do well to arm himself with humility, and let them speak for themselves. Later on the time will come to sift, to compare, and to bring to life again; but first he should listen ...”

“... is one         Free in soul beneath the sun.Mazzini might die ‘chainless’, but the young poet’s sense of honour felt shackled. ‘Too long the world has waited,’ the second stanza begins, ‘Against his chain the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford ...”

“... is concerned’, as he wrote in Reality versus Romance in South Central Africa (1893). Six ‘young Jamaican men’ accompanied him to ‘relieve the white man of manual toil’, although there was ‘their natural lack of “stick-at-it-iveness” and backbone to be overcome’. By 1901, Carby notes, he had become ‘a well-paid creator of tourist ...”

“... Finish Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea, an account of the time he spent at Aldeburgh as a young man. It’s uncritical of the regime, adulatory of Britten and Imogen Holst, though more muted about Pears. The fact is Aldeburgh was a court, and whether the ruler is Henry VIII or Benjamin Britten all courts are the same, with the courtiers anxious to ...”

“... men lounging on street corners, Saturday-night fights, the number of barefoot children, how many young women drank in the local (the women in Southwark, we learn, ‘live on fried fish and four ale’, a mild beer sold at fourpence a quart). They populated their notebooks with vignettes of dock labourers, organ grinders, costers and ...”