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“... to try to read it, those who have tried and failed, and … those who write about it’. Roger Marsh, the producer of Jim Norton’s and Marcella Riordan’s haunting audio version, names ‘new readers’, ‘readers who have never been able to make much headway’ and ‘those who already have some familiarity with the book’. For good ...”

“... including the who-is-sleeping-with-whom variety. Wilson called in the then head of MI5, Roger Hollis, and told him that MI5 would in future have to seek his personal approval before investigating any MP. Telephone-tapping, the interception of letters, the examining of bank accounts were specifically forbidden. And Wilson warned Hollis that he would ...”

“... Haley and the Four Aces of Western Swing, before he saw where the real pension dollars were. Hank Williams had already taken a lot of the corn out of country and amped up the backbeat. Williams’s style was unashamedly backwoods, though, his son-of-a-gun accent upfront (when he sings ‘I don’t care if tomorrow never ...”

“... of 23 April 2015). Historians are equally prone to dismiss as royalist propaganda the report by Roger Coke, grandson of the author of the Petition of Right of 1628 (which affirmed constitutional protections against an overweening monarchy), that Cromwell once called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can believe that one, too.When Oliver first elbowed his ...”

“... Talking about a visit to New York in 1945, Powell will come up with paragraphs on Tennessee Williams, silent movies, his wife’s pregnancy, American buyers’ attitudes to British war movies, the possibility of his buying United Artists with Emeric, the demise of the silents, meeting Salvador Dali, then suddenly: Do I digress? Well I digress. Art has ...”

“... To explain exactly what the author was up to would be equivalent to identifying the murderer of Roger Ackroyd. Honour will be satisfied if he indicates in the most general terms the sort of thing the novelist might be attempting and makes a few knowing comments about particular devices or references that he thinks he has penetrated. Thus it comes about that ...”

“... monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ‘natural’ images. But there is some force in Alastair Fowler’s counter-argument that Jonson’s poem, far from excluding labour, helped to pioneer in England a Georgic ...”

“... and extraordinarily effective campaigners. Of these E.D. Morel of the Congo Reform Society and Roger Casement, first British consul to the Congo Free State, are much the most famous. Hochschild also writes generously of the labours of several other, less well-known campaigners, among them two pioneering, eccentric American blacks, George Washington ...”

“... black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. That would come as news to Cornel West, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Pankaj Mishra, all of whom have publicly criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if they are all part of the same continuous trend. More ...”

“... as he would say, foolish. He cannot recall the name of the funeral parlour where Tennessee Williams lay in state nor can he remember the venue (‘some pub in Fleet Street’) where he was to meet Gore Vidal. Probably it had been so with us had we been there, but we might not have thought it necessary to say so, especially if, like Gordon himself, we ...”

“... a lot of talk about ‘talking the language of the new politics’, and I think I heard Shirley Williams refer to the ‘nodes of the new society’. Ian Bradley sees this new society as a post-social democratic society. For him, liberalism is a mystical cult of the individual. Everything that suits his argument, or rather quasi-religious faith, is dragged ...”

“... it must be an entirely fabricated, artificial, written invention.’ After feminism (to which Roger Scruton also contributes, see below), the essays in ‘The Body Politic’ turn to the subject of Aids. Here, too, but somewhat more straightforwardly, language is seen as something that buoys up the Establishment, and explicitly or implicitly downgrades ...”

“... attention. We have the story of the actor’s coughing off the stage a melodrama based on Caleb Williams; and a just appraisal of Mrs Siddons’s superior powers as a performer. We hear of her brother, with his poor singing voice, ‘murdering’ Grétry – the word is the Irish tenor Michael Kelly’s – and we witness a number of total theatrical ...”

“... of the abstract art of Bomberg, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska against the apparent progressivism of Roger Fry and Bloomsbury. He had found his preferred version of human nature in Byzantine art, and its recovery in these abstract Modernists. One of the many things that is so interesting about him, and that Robert Ferguson illuminates in this first thorough ...”

“... a bridge or shutting down a stretch of Oxford Street, as they did in 2019. Both Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam, two of the movement’s founding activists, have been exemplary arrestables. Arrests, they argue, are the necessary price for refusing a police order to move, and if enough people are detained, police stations and magistrates’ courts, perhaps even ...”