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“... seek to prevent it? Can one really imagine him siding with Eric Heffer against Bryan Gould, or Ron Todd against Gavin Laird? However little he liked to contemplate the rapacious pursuit of private profit by industrialists pretending that money spent on the social services ought instead to be left in their own pockets, Tawney had equally little liking for ...”

“... or abuse, to display our knowledge of wool weights by reference to cloves, tods and weys, or (if we encounter an ear-clipper) to understand the difference between a fidder, a hingin’ widder, a stoo or a gongbit. As the anecdotes and biographical sketches of Outback attest, a glossary of powerful and pungent expressions is also to be found in the ...”

“... remote, even quaint, the Tres Grandes of the Mexican School – Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – are often treated as a single entity. Where distinctions are made, the didacticism of Rivera’s work tends, and I believe deserves, to be unfavourably compared to the expressionist passion of Orozco, and even to the ungainliness of ...”

“... a road novel midway and ends with a sloppy orgy in the Texas desert. The ever ironical narrator, David Bell, is fond of making statements like ‘I was an extremely handsome young man,’ and worships at the altar of Burt Lancaster: ‘Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it.’ ‘I don’t think my first ...”

“... the silliness of ‘silly females’ was often due to failures in their upbringing. How could we expect creatures misguided from infancy to grow into anything other than weak, foolish and irrational adults? Her first book, a slim and cheerless collection of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), begins by slamming mothers. From the moment girls ...”

“... the question: what on earth is going on? What are academics doing, taking industrial action? We live in revolutionary times, and much that would have seemed unimaginable ten years ago has come to pass. Who would have prophesied in 1979, with some prospect of being taken seriously, that not merely Rolls-Royce and British Leyland and the National Freight ...”

“... a triple-decker steak sandwich washed down with bourbon’. Lunch, ‘inhaled’ (this is David Thomson’s word) while rehearsing The Shoemaker’s Holiday, soon to be Welles’s second hit for the Mercury Players, was comparably stupefying. Callow depicts Welles perched at a table in the stalls, ‘roaring out instructions and mock abuse as he ...”

“... been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.’ Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed the film-maker’s ‘bumptious expression’, as well as his ‘pin-head face’ and ‘flapping ears’. Jennings talked and ...”

“... might have issued from Christ’s breast.The consummation imagined here is tellingly related in David Kennedy’s astute essay on Prince’s ‘Portrayal of National Bodies’ to a notebook entry the poet made in 1950, which details a bored church elder haunted by a ‘dream of naked man, opening his arms, receiving love and death upon his bare ...”

“... that Rogan finds inadequate. Historians who derive inspiration from Thompson, notably Selina Todd, author of The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 (2014), formulate their notions of class from the perspective of individual experience and identity. The poststructuralist turn of the late 1980s in academic history banished material ...”

“... murderer’s demeanour, a frightening glint or a nervous tic by which to know him for different, we were baffled by his ordinariness; anxious not to be thought ill-mannered, he held out no greater token of a need for forgiveness than this piece of social small-change.Alfred Hitchcock would have been pleased and frightened by this incongruity, as he was by so ...”

“... fifteen years. (Once, during a strained public conversation in Waterstone’s, Charing Cross Road, we had been interrupted by a foam-flecked out-patient yelling: ‘How often do you sleep with prostitutes?’) But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather ...”

“... Journalism) to more than 90 per cent of all the deaths in drone strikes (the ex-military officers David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum). In March 2012, the New York Times reported that all military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise; the Obama administration recently disputed ...”

“... their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong.(My friend Todd Gitlin, author of the best book on this period, points out the ranking of ‘fight, kill and maybe die’ as the correct order in which anti-war people listed their objections.) But towards the close of this telling letter, Clinton explains to Holmes why it ...”

“... Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.’ On Sunday 27 January André Gide, also in Algiers, was, according to ...”