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“... to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially with Elliot Paul), and Jolas, too, was at the heart of art movements about which at the time the outside world knew little – Surrealism, Dadaism and Joyce among them. Few small mags have done as much to ‘make art free’. As well as Stein’s ‘Elucidation’, the first ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than himself.’I picked up. ‘Are you safe?’ my 20-year-old said.‘There’s none of us safe in the world.’‘No, I’m serious. Trump’s been shot or something.’I got up CNN on my ...”

“... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking ...”

“... yet languid accent of the Eton and Christ Church of his day, Eden could well have seemed more a man of fashion than a politician of the first rank. St James’s Street rather than Westminster or Whitehall might have been expected to be his habitat. Yet the most cursory glance at his career dispels the illusion. Unless one is very tough and very ...”

“... from ‘barren Caledonian lands’. At the King’s Theatre, Gluck laid on an opera (La caduta de’ giganti or The Fall of the Giants) which was an allegory of the crisis. Catholic chapels burned all over England, and visiting Scots sought in terror to conceal their accent.At first, the rising had seemed almost trivial. In August 1745, Duncan ...”

“... in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative ...”

“... their children. Yet justice demands that everyone be treated equally; such slogans as ‘I am a man’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ express this basic egalitarianism. The problem and the pain of love is that, for all of us, some people matter infinitely more than others.Any reckoning with the affective qualities of justice must also weigh the importance of ...”

“... his paedophilic housemaster. If Williams’s notion does not take sufficient account of the Paul Foots of this world, it also fails to take account of the army of ex-working-class socialists who are not averse to swapping their political beliefs for a Jacobean farmhouse in Kent. Orwell did not get a bullet through his throat in Spain because he was ...”

“... James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with life’ which allowed African Americans to navigate a white world not of their making, a world that ...”

“... Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale of a doomed, obsessional love affair between a man in his thirties and an 18-year-old shop girl – Nabokov. Indeed, his affection for the European tradition is as crucial to his appeal as his Turkishness, and his books pay tribute to values deeply embedded in the liberal imagination: romantic love freed from ...”

“... his most famous tenant, wrote about his landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, ‘Old Man Trump’:I supposeOld Man Trump knowsJust how muchRacial hatehe stirred upIn the bloodpot of human heartsWhen he drawedThat colour lineHere at hisEighteen hundred family projectIn 1988, Spy conducted a national poll, the ...”

“... cards – even its prominent director, Dr Oleg Bogomolov, a former Central Committee member, the man who publicly announced the ending of the Brezhnev Doctrine. These are therefore crucial times for Soviet reform, though the effect of so describing them is somewhat undermined by the fact that epithets like ‘crucial’ or ‘critical’ or ...”

“... he dies, his promise unfulfilled, in what Coleridge’s poem calls ‘caverns measureless to man’. For Hank has an unexpected hobby, potholing, and at the end of the play drowns in a cave. Death turns up there, announcing himself as ‘a noble person from Porlock’. There is a lot of MacNeice in Hank. After the high promise of Poems (1935), he began ...”