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“... to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of East London. ‘As much as anything adverts for the very idea of critical thought.’The first Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, at Goldsmiths in January 2018, was given by the artist and writer Kodwo ...”

“... for the delay). Raleigh’s attempts at colonisation followed hard on other ambitious voyages. Martin Frobisher thought he had found gold in the course of his 1576 search for the Northwest Passage. In 1578 he retraced his steps and brought home 1350 tons of ore from which ‘neither gold, silver nor any other metal could be drawn’. It was thrown away or ...”

“... I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank Martin, the head of the department, and would be published in the year of his retirement. Caro and ...”

“... on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each ...”

“... from Ireland to England. This may be so, although orphans and changelings are also a mainstay of Gilbert and Sullivan, and of the popular Victorian theatre in general. Shaw was certainly sympathetic, but it seems to me that what he appreciated most was the theatrical quality of the situation and its openness to paradox. He is tempted, he tells Margaret, to ...”

“... Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so it might never have been created had it not been for the remarkable things that happened to its author and his consciousness, as a result of a cocktail of ...”

“... Martin Stannard resisted the temptation to call this story Decline and Fall, but it would not have been a bad title. On one level, the last 27 years of Evelyn Waugh’s life make melancholy reading. The book begins with Waugh’s sometimes bizarre career in the Army; it chronicles his prodigious commercial success as the author of Brideshead Revisited ...”

“... cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 nearby, diagonally traversed by Dan Flavin’s 1968 piece, knee high and fifty-odd feet long, coolly ...”

“... mentions Vespucci, whose accounts of his travels had been published by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in a volume that included a map christening the newly found continents ‘America’. More added detail to lend his fantasy substance, including the Utopians’ alphabet, a woodcut of their croissant-shaped island resembling maps in ...”

“... On 16 March 1810​ a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides ...”

“... considerably, all the while enjoying a well-rounded private life: after an affair with John Gilbert, she took up with young buck Gary Cooper ... You can feel Nemesis coming on with every drop of a name. Sure enough: Her bedroom was chock-a-block with gardenias and tuberoses; it glowed with the flicker of several dozen candles. In this shrine to her ...”

“... shown over the Manchurian affair. Its reward was to be denounced for warmongering by among others Gilbert Murray. Collective security was not a policy. It was a phrase which could become a policy only if its implications were accepted. These, I think, were two, and it was over these that the NS&N dithered. The first was armaments. If collective security means ...”

“... by, I think, 14 publishers’ (its protagonist is ‘Kingsley Amis’, like the character ‘Martin Amis’ in Money); or the unfinished ‘Difficulties with Girls’, written in 1981-82 (a title retained for a quite different novel of 1988, the sequel to Take a Girl like You). One also has to come to the Huntington to read the letters (or many of ...”

“... My favourite moment in Martin Gilbert’s Life of Churchill is when the Prime Minister is touring the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945: In the square in front of the building a crowd of Germans had gathered. Except for one old man who ‘shook his head disapprovingly’, Churchill later recalled, ‘they all began to cheer ...”

“... conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in his memoirs, persuaded him that Gothic was the only style for a Christian country, leaving him to denounce both trabeation and impure Gothic styles. Rather than suggest the ...”