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“... this alignment between deconstruction and a radical critique of existing political discourse. Michael Ryan has an essay on the inbuilt contradictions of liberal reason, arguing that we need a different epistemology – an alternative idea of language, politics and truth – in order to grasp and transcend these antinomies. The trouble with this ...”

“... at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest ...”

“... heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were undermining ...”

“... in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir ...”

“... in the UK’s response to the pandemic, the government’s messengers were richly rewarded. Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office gave Topham Guerin a £3 million contract for communications work. The contract – agreed without any competitive tendering – was signed in early May but, unusually, backdated to 17 March, two days before Lee Cain’s Zoom ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... and reducing her, at least temporarily, to a meekly spousal role. Graves, for whom Riding was the White Goddess – ‘she was his muse and he loved her and abandoned himself to her,’ as one of the other disciples touchingly remarked towards the end – would have been horrified by such an outcome. But perhaps she secretly hankered for such a ...”

“... strike); in politics (Washington, LA and New York varieties); in gossip (on Nancy Reagan, whose White House nicknames included ‘Evita’ and ‘The Hairdo with Anxiety’, and whose edgy cluelessness is fixed for all time by a single detail: ‘At a state dinner for José Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador, she seated herself between President Duarte and ...”

“... designed by Mies van der Rohe, curtains by Ben Nicholson, sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, a white skin sofa. A temporarily unirascible Geoffrey Grigson found their home ‘a place of parties, of extraordinary entertainment’, where one might meet Braque or Helion, the Nicholsons and the Moores, some of the artistic refugees from Hitler’s ...”

“... Books’, ‘Stories 1900-1939’ and so on – splendidly produced, with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and giving a good indication of what’s been available at various moments during this interesting period. We have only to glance at the catalogue to see how the Edwardian idea of manliness was purveyed for adolescent boys (‘A Lad of ...”

“... that exposed them in the end, not the parti-coloured Empire of contemptuous exploitation, but the white settler Empire to which they looked for support. Like the Northerners, the pioneers of New Zealand and South Africa had too much use for rugby in the formation of identity and the bonding of community to take it casually and they quickly developed it to the ...”

“... He looks down into a narwhal’s mouth, at ‘the accordion pleats of its tongue, at the soft white interior splashed with Tyrian purple’. That allusion to Carthage and its famous purple dye (derived from whelks) is typical of the classical marquetry which adorns his scientific observation. His evocation of a narwhal’s ‘sea-washed back’ echoes ...”

“... life, while taking an infusion of colour and variety from outside. Reproduced in black and white (more disadvantageous to this kind of painting than to any other), the paintings seem to have been bled of their vitality by some sort of vampiric borrowing of life. Even so they have a poignancy, indeed a saving inarticulacy, which the poems are likely to ...”

“... favour of the ‘legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’, elicited, 827 phone-calls to the White House and 7,268 protest telegrams. Statistics like these flesh out the clichés about the Zionist lobby wagging the dog of US foreign policy. At first glance, the rise of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ in the Middle East suggests that the thin veneer of ...”

“... Good as Gold by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail-bird, Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, John Cheever’s Selected Stories, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, William ...”