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“... Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory ...”

“... with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa Monica Mountains, then banking briefly over the ...”

“... were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and repression ...”

“... Some shockheaded Struwwelpeter. A Malcolm McLaren whispering of historical precedents: Tyburn, the Gordon riots, Newgate ablaze, ‘Dickensian’ revengers pouring out of the slums and rookeries. It could catch on. It could be the next buzz. What was being declared here was not so much a class war as a style war. The era of the mob was announced by bursts of ...”

“... drastic spring-cleaning of The Waste Land, reveal a rhythm rather than imposing one. Perhaps only Gordon Lish’s transformations of Raymond Carver’s stories impose rhythm in that way. Meadow’s first film, Portrait of Deke, made in 1987, didn’t really come together, didn’t acquire its tone or form until the editing stage. At high school, inspired by ...”

“... Turner notes that the words and melody of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ were lifted from a song by Gordon Jenkins, who reached an out-of-court settlement with Cash in the late 1960s. ‘Ring of Fire’, ‘Boy Named Sue’ and ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ were all written by others; likewise, cover versions of Cash’s songs are often an improvement on the ...”

“... ignoble at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the ...”

“... and conducted in great secrecy – the only time that the door between the offices of Marcia Williams and the Prime Minister was locked was when the representatives of MI5 or MI6 were visiting – but Wilson found the evidence conclusive. After the strike had dragged on for six disastrous weeks he denounced the union leaders in the House. A ‘tightly ...”

“... in Paternoster Square. One by one or in neatly opposed couples – Ken Clarke and Shirley Williams, say – funeral attendees were interrogated about the legacy. Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of local stereotypes have been assembled, some of them (like Dave and Samantha Cameron) quite obviously having a good time, with smiles and ...”

“... it (‘When 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 ...”

“... has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member ...”

“... not alone in failing to see this. A few years earlier, Edward had published a review of Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of Tom Nairn and myself, but more wounding in effect. One of his charges was that Raymond had become half-absorbed, in manner and preoccupation, by the ruling-class ...”

“... Sargent was the man of the hour. The following year, there was an all-British programme: Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Delius, Boughton and Walton, before Sargent concluded the programme with Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture and Serenade for Strings, followed by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and the Sea Songs. For this 1948 final Prom, some Promenaders queued for ...”

“... brought more securely into the ambit of committee-land, vote-purchase and moral assassination’. Gordon Brown’s handing over of more control to the Bank of England was the ‘final capitulation’ of Parliament ‘to the commercial and financial interests of the City’. And the metropolitan media, ‘crazily centralised and coarsened, roughly in tempo ...”

“... 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue ...”