The phrase "ago when he wrote" is not correct in standard written English.
It is typically used to refer to a specific time in the past when something was written, but the structure is awkward and unclear.
Example: "It was many years ago when he wrote that famous novel."
Alternatives: "years back when he wrote" or "some time ago when he wrote".
That's what Deford was thinking about thirty years ago, when he wrote about Gus Johnson, Deford's own preferred sporting coeval.
The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim was right almost a century ago when he wrote of religion as "an eminently social thing".
He secured his reputation decades ago, when he wrote a slim but memorable volume with Douglas Adams ("Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") called "The Meaning of Liff".
Alexander Paterson hit the nail on the head 80 years ago when he wrote: "Wherever we build prisons, the courts will make use of them".
Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at National Journal, tapped into the inherent humor of this contradiction some years ago, when he wrote a much-read meditation in The Atlantic on introversion.
The idea for "The Astronaut's Tale" came to Mr. Larson more than 20 years ago, when he wrote a new version of the text for Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat," which was performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Dylan Byers, of Politico.com, offered an answer, a week ago Saturday, when he wrote that Times sources told him that Abramson was fired because she misled Sulzberger, telling him that she had kept Baquet fully informed about hiring Gibson as a managing editor.
It is a point he made years ago in Mao II, when he wrote, "I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture.
"I tried to work with him ages ago when he first wrote Booky Wook and we talked to him about doing a more dramatised version but it didn't happen," he said.
As an exercise, it was not so different from what the Marxist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon described, forty-four yeago ago in French-colonial Algeria, when he wrote that the last "property" of a desperate man, a man who had lost everything, was his family — that to own a family was to own something.
But he articulated perhaps the best argument for it a couple weeks ago in The New York Times, when he wrote: Rebuilding confidence might seem a small matter, but it is not.
