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“... Arif Ahmed​ , a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, has been appointed the UK’s first ‘free speech tsar’. The position – Ahmed’s official title will be director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May ...”

“... In September​ 2013, the Halle Saint Pierre gallery in Montmartre mounted an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of the British magazine Raw Vision. The magazine, like the gallery, is devoted to Art Brut, a movement that insists on the value of art made by self-taught artists, including patients in psychiatric hospitals ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... On a damp, chill, blustery August afternoon in Whitby a few years ago I overheard a disgruntled holidaymaker declaiming – to his family, to anyone who would listen, to the wind – that ‘global warming is a load of codswallop ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... 3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills ...”

“... it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among ...”

“... On the Phone Behind​ a branch of a fast-food chain in Lincoln, there is a featureless yellow brick call centre open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. From the level of noise as the call centre handlers walk in, they can often guess what’s happening across the country ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... through central Berlin to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was –18°C. They shuffled and waited in the bone-numbing cold for four hours to hear the podium speeches of the party cadres. As Hobsbawm would recall much ...”

“... Off to a great start at lunch in Phoenix airport: Terrorist Threat Level Orange for ‘high’ as usual, women’s restrooms jammed, and then the waiter in Aunt Chilada’s Cantina – garish faux-Mexican with a jalapeño pepper theme – calls me ‘sir’ when he takes our order ...”

“... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...”

“... This last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles ...”

“... Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.Edward DowdenPassionate art, the drowner of dykes ...W.B. YeatsI suppose this is my biography, my life. Fragments of memory. Perhaps even a memorial. Except that I don’t believe in biographies and advise you to be especially sceptical about this one, written, one has to say, under the stress of illness and in extreme haste ...”

“... The NarrativeV: Whose Fault?VI: The RebellionVII: The FactsFilm AudioI: The FireIt was​ a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun ...”