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“... bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the ...”

“... women, as he must surely have done; most of the men in differing degrees ninnies. Miracles of light, the paintings are also miracles of space as, for instance, The Milkmaid, where the space behind the stream of milk coming from the jug is almost tangible. I have a sense of vertigo, though, in the presence of great paintings, as when standing on a cliff ...”

“... Burglary in Pangbourne I attended once where they done it halfway up the wall in an 18th-century light fitting. Any other sphere and they’d have got the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.’ ‘You’ve perhaps not noticed,’ Mr Ransome said grimly, ‘but we don’t have any light fittings.’ ‘Another one in Guildford did ...”

“... on determinedly to their powerful positions but ripe for removal; like those who controlled the Light Programme in the years before rock’n’roll. Several novels and short stories have absorbed and portrayed the rave revolution over the years, and now raving is being given a history. There’s no consensus about its origins: to some of the writers ...”

“... as well as boys, the conclusion of many of them, Floreat Etona. A dolly mounted with a ramshackle light screen trundles the camera round the cloisters with the actors rushing along behind as the King argues with the Prince of Wales and the courtiers scurry after them trying to keep up. What I hope we capture is how wanting in proper ceremony the 18th-century ...”

“... VJ Days are indistinguishable in memory, my lasting impression of both the sudden availability of light, shone on public buildings and streaming away prodigally into the night sky. This was a regular feature thereafter and still an object of wonder into the early 1950s.16 August. This aspect of things comes up again when I go round to the Millers this morning ...”

“... be a structuralist takeover of criticism. Characteristically, he sees the matter in a different light, noting the affinity between the new structuralism and older kinds of ‘immanentist’ criticism, including the work of Spitzer but also including the New Criticism; and over against these approaches he sets the hermeneutic, better suited to handle works ...”

“... however we feel about his archness or his films. His sense of the possibilities of ‘the ink of light’, of ‘writing with pictures’, is immense, as is his faith in young filmmakers and young audiences. Above all Cocteau loyally represents what the cinema might be. ‘What a lesson in freedom you give all of us,’ he quotes Alain Resnais as saying; and ...”

“... Light​ Perpetual starts with a description of a V2 about to explode on a Saturday in 1944. The tone is one of uneasy technological rapture: ‘a thread-wide front of change propagating outward from the electric detonator, through the heavy mass of amatol’. Francis Spufford has written about rockets before, in his non-fiction, engaging imaginatively with the Russian space race in Red Plenty and playing the V2 campaign at least partly for comedy in Backroom Boys, where he assessed the impact on morale of the V2 in Lowestoft ...”

“... those who don’t already know, these biographical details all apply to the author of the novel, Alan Sillitoe. This is to be a candidly, if not straightforwardly autobiographical work. It is also the concluding volume in the series that began with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur Seaton, the leading figure in that novel, has here only a walk-on ...”

“... a world with close relatives, the australopithecines, who were equally specialist vegetarians. As Alan Walker shows in The Wisdom of Bones, to view Homo erectus as a kind of missing link would be a mistake. Walker’s is a case-history of a startling find, the nearly complete skeleton of an African adolescent male Homo erectus, who died near the shores of ...”

“... Merritt overheard one bystander mutter, ‘look how brown he is, he’s had a bloody good time.’ Alan Allport’s engaging look at the demobilisation of British soldiers after the war begins, in a sense, from Merritt’s feeling of deflation. There were five million Britons in uniform on VE Day, 90 per cent of them male. (Allport doesn’t concern himself ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... I have described as a thing of the past. Let me single out five sets of problems that throw some light on how Marxist studies came to develop in the way they did. First, there is Marx’s ambiguous attitude to Hegel, reflected in the strongly divergent views that later Marxists have held in this respect. As observed by Russell Jacoby, this also corresponds ...”

“... language alone that numbers him among the masters, but it is what strikes you first. From Light Years of 1975: ‘On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart ...”