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“... without spectacle’. It was Debord who scrawled ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’ on the wall of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1953 to mark the frontier between the city as Situationist playground and capitalist work-camp. Other Situationists reported on ‘dérives’ as if they were military actions behind enemy lines and described how they had ...”

“... north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring ...”

“... Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height. Heaney says that ‘over the years I came to identify my own life with the life ...”

“... doorway. The coats they unbutton to effect this, holding them together to form a sort of inner wall, make for an eroticism much sharper, much more modern, than in the Victorian novels. There’s nothing ‘frissony’ about it. It’s simply sex. The Duncan story, though diffuse and not entirely coherent, is shocking, ambitious, morally searching in a way ...”

“... west towards Islington, on a bright October morning, I was swallowed up, rammed against the wall, by 67 bicycles – yes, I counted – on the stretch between the Mare Street and Kingsland Road bridges. Ting ting, they sound their bells. Some from a residual sense of courtesy. Some as a kamikaze warning. Some with Mandelsonian disdain. British Waterways ...”

“... critically we are stitched into the particulars of the places where we choose to make our home. Patrick Keiller, a scrupulous observer from the misted windows of trains, added the Nine Elms Coal Hopper to his album of found architecture. The site was demolished in the winter of 1979-80, before being squatted by a car breaker. The Hopper lives on in ...”

“... the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin, a superb painting but hung on the same wall as the National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus. This is nowhere near as good because the central figures don’t compare. In the Dublin picture Christ with his downcast eyes is ascetic and noble (with Judas yearning and troubled). In the NG’s picture ...”

“... by the most prominent left-wing commentator in Britain, a Corbyn insider. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have assembled their book from an impressive array of interviews with key members of Corbyn’s team, as well as with others implacably opposed to his leadership. Where they primarily document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and ...”

“... by Brexit that the parliamentary debate on its findings was attended by only a handful of MPs. Patrick Porter’s Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (2018) showed that responsibility lay with the British elite as a whole and couldn’t be limited to Blair. But Porter’s account also perpetuated the official story that the war ‘exposed the deadliness of ...”

“... continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the political arc of Swingler’s life from pacifist-into-socialist Popular Front days, through class war, civil war, world war to postwar Labour Government and the faint ...”

“... flat into a brothel, Frank grows up spying on prostitutes and their clients through a hole in the wall. But although money, power and self-gratification seem the only values that matter in the world around him, he’s nevertheless fascinated by the wholesome ménage in the flat underneath his own, where a widower, Holst, lives with his 16-year-old ...”

“... his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell ...”

“... beach made me witness to a quite interesting gangbang in which the principal performers were Patrick (and equipage, rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal physique. I merely held the gloves, as it were, but it was quite interesting en plein air.’ Then it’s on to Spoleto: ‘This place is mad – Festival of Fifty ...”

“... eyes [were] spattering tears.’ Having been assaulted – ‘pinned to the dining room wall’ – and beaten for what he loved and who he was, he goes on to describe his relentless shopping for his sisters as ‘my assault of buying clothes’. The book continues mostly as it began: it is a precise, unrancorous (mostly) record of his nascent ...”

“... the new tourist trade, you can see where Allende once added his signature to those scrawled on the wall. ‘Cuba Libre,’ it says. ‘Chile espera.’ That was on 28 June 1961. The inscription possesses an almost antique quality these days, like a graffito from a revolutionary Pompeii. Allende, in other words, was Old Left: a dedicated physician, an ...”