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“... clarity of fine enamel; pale blue of sea and sky, the russet of dead bracken and fern, deep purple brown of unbudded birch, and the paler violets of the Skye hills and the peaks of Rum’. Already, the book was sending me to the window, to the cottage door, to see these West Highland colours for myself, see them better. But then there comes a passage in ...”

“... him, isn’t he?’ my granny would say. ‘Always had a dark side. Probably got it from his uncle Peter. He was like that as well. Morbid.’ ‘You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself,’ my father would say. ‘If something ever happens to you, I suppose you’ll want one of them statues to yourself up in the Glasgow Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I ...”

“... most of which would have been to pay for continuous care. Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a ...”

“... Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ‘sharpening of ...”

“... washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives ...”

“... on the gramophone) and places I couldn’t visit (the house in St Luke’s Road with a brown plaque in memory of W.H. Hudson) because they either reminded me of her and therefore of death or of death and therefore of her. I kept on telling myself: ‘I mustn’t be rushed.’ Somehow or other, the friends had to be warned off, kept at bay. I ...”

“... corner of the mouth or held in the hand in such a way that the smoke would turn his fingers oak-brown, the felt hat, dark shirt and light tie, which gave him a gangsterish appearance, though more Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the term ‘gay’ wasn’t used then), though I can’t recall just how ...”

“... the marginal social acceptability of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, whose hand, ‘holding the teacup, was very brown, and very, very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap there were hairpins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.’ Both these essays show off Davenport’s range and gusto, his feats of ...”

“... Black male artist works very hard to get his due,’ Gladys Knight said. ‘If Bobby Brown had across the board play and could compete in the same [pop] categories George Michael competes in, that would be a whole other thing.’Michael was the biggest selling musician in the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael ...”

“... was added to the bad ‘news’. Women become clocks, always ticking away, like the crocodile in Peter Pan who had swallowed the alarm clock. Women must marry and have children immediately, skipping the attractions of further education or interesting careers. There were no men and yet it was every young woman’s painful duty to try to find and hang onto a ...”

“... windfall tax on profits imposed in 1981 by Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe. (Blair or Brown would never dream of doing anything like that to the City.) But the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the increasingly international flow of capital, combined with the abolition of restrictions on trading practices which culminated in the ‘Big ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... nine-to-five wage-slave grind found its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The ...”

“... the International Monetary Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more authoritative figure. No one to my knowledge has done the equivalent calculation for the ...”