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“... as a film clip taken from a silent work from 1913 called Lime Kiln Club Field Day. It stars Bert Williams, a black actor who often appeared in blackface make-up, as he does here, in an editorial arrangement which has him peering through a stand of trees, apparently looking into the colour-film present, wondering what is happening. The other memory is a ...”

“... new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being ...”

“... members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A Hymn to ...”

“... historical and social circumstances within which many of its impulses and problems were formed. Michael Meyer’s long and interesting biography has much less of this quality, though its sustained narrative offers a good deal of the information. At its centre is an understandable emphasis on Strindberg as dramatist; his fiction and other prose are treated ...”

“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...”

“... to discriminate (a key word) between the living and the hollow. The Uses of Literacy, like Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, which appeared a year later, was a product of the tension between its author’s Leavisian methods and his un-Leavisian politics. The highly personal survey of working-class culture in the first half of The Uses of Literacy was a ...”

“... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...”

“... managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in Beaverbrook’s success. The first is that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on his side ...”

“... on Fifth Avenue; he now lives in a townhouse on East 92nd Street. He plays jazz clarinet at Michael’s Pub, and rarely misses a game of the New York Knicks. Marion Meade’s new biography is judicious and independent-minded on all the important issues, even-handed without being bland. She hasn’t spoken to Allen – or he hasn’t spoken to her ...”

“... many documents and interviewed dozens of helpful people, many of them now dead. But the assiduous Michael Shelden has found lots more paper, and interviewed not only the survivors on Crick’s list but others whom his predecessor did not come upon. His book is as long as Crick’s and inevitably repeats much that is in the earlier work, so it was all the more ...”

“... Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left and ended (famously) as a critique of Neil Kinnock. It argued that the political judgments and electoral sociology upon which the Bennites had based their ...”

“... as long as a Conservative government was in power. A handful of rebels was neither here nor there. Michael Heseltine’s extended tract is a measure of how far, under Mrs Thatcher, this expectation remains unfulfilled. The Prime Minister’s abrasive relations with Britain’s European partners have been one of the characteristics of her period in office. For ...”