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“... in the eight essays. One of these is beautifully articulated in the chapter entitled ‘Homage to Francis Hutcheson’ and reappears in various forms elsewhere, in discussions of the Protestant Ascendancy and hegemony, of Edmund Burke and the Arnoldian appropriation of his peculiar version of cultural aesthetics and nationalism, of Gothic fiction and the ...”

“... himself, and here he addresses a dead friend, whom he believes he has seen in a hotel corridor: ‘Francis, it was you yesterday, though I knew you were dead.’ The experience is offered both as an event that really happened, and as a dream occurring in the midst of        that brief deep And self-satisfied sleep Which is our charmed life – a ...”

“... study of Tati which invokes Rilke, Cervantes, Cocteau, La Bruyère, Desnos, Eluard, Gogol, Beckett, Kafka and St Francis. ‘It’s not that these are inappropriate or misleading points of cultural reference in a serious attempt to explain the place and importance of M. Hulot,’ he explains. ‘It’s just that Tati ...”

“... the life of the city. Brougham served with the same gun in a company of artillery as Playfair, and Francis Horner walked the streets with a musket, being a private in the Gentlemen Regiment. As for Sir Walter Scott, he became the life and soul of the Edinburgh troop of the Midlothian Yeomanry Cavalry.’ The Northern Athens was classier than most British ...”

“... has influenced more than one generation of British film-makers, and what he did for the stage – Beckett, Pinter, Tom Murphy, Terence Rattigan – has changed the game for several more to come. You might say the drama in Karel Reisz’s life existed at quite a deep level, but it also existed in his conversation. At tables, in cars, in foyers, on the ...”

“... an expert commentator on vanity’s machinations: Auden said something disparaging about Samuel Beckett getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nikos said: ‘Who else is there?’ Auden shook his head so all the sagging wrinkles shook and said: ‘There’s me.’ At Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful ...”

“... or settle for palliative care which at its best is a comfortable death without pain. What Francis Bacon called ‘a fair and easy passage’, which I used as the title of a TV play written and broadcast long ago. An announcement of forthcoming but more or less certain death by a public figure opens our eyes to death, the one that is coming to us ...”

“... for real. Wyndham Lewis is a good example of the first; Gorky and de Kooning of the second. Francis Bacon started, so the Tate show demonstrates, as a diligent – too diligent – student of the second kind, battling away at the enigma of Cubist space; he failed to solve it; and where he ended up is another matter.) The question remains why. What stood ...”

“... sets up an echo chamber of affirmations of Johnson’s eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places Johnson’s literary criticism within the ‘ancient genre of wisdom writing’. Focusing on only a ‘portion of Johnson … the moralist and critic’ (though he could be ...”

“... party given by Lady Rothermere. He was the beautiful untidy young man standing at the back next to Francis Bacon and booing loudly while everyone else clapped Princess Margaret’s execrable rendering of a Cole Porter medley. Here, nicely arrayed, are the components of the bohemian life of that period. Scruffy, wild and very good-looking artists (geniuses only ...”

“... Italian model and towards the German one. According to Kenny, Joyce, along with his associate John Beckett, was responsible for making Mosley’s organisation more anti-semitic. Other office-holders became concerned that his speeches were so vitriolic they left potential supporters behind. He said repeatedly and obsessively that Jews were responsible for all ...”

“... that has kept him off the air. Debray sees Althusser as some kind of incorruptible ascetic, a Beckett of ‘theoretical practice’. He himself is neither an Althusser nor a Clavel. But it is not clear which he would prefer to be. Since Debray wrote those lines, Althusser has strangled his wife and been interned in a mental hospital. Would more telephone ...”

“... and Letters (1979), a big book of specific questions posed by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, members of the editorial committee of New Left Review; and of answers, rarely as specific or pointed, offered by Williams. The second section of Politics and Letters includes detailed criticism of The Long Revolution and Williams’s response to ...”

“... as many obstacles as in The Shadow-Line but reaches a different and more wondrous conclusion (Francis Ford Coppola borrowed it for Apocalypse Now, his film version of Heart of Darkness). Touching shore at long last in the dark, Marlow wakes from the sleep of exhaustion to a silent dawn: I opened my eyes … and then I saw the men of the East – they ...”

“... rhythms of travel and memory supply all the pattern he needs, and the nods to Kafka, Faulkner and Beckett don’t look stiff. In the caustic accounts of hikers’ self-indulgent inwardness, and of the way backpackers float their idylls on a sea of poverty, he gets at themes dramatised in his earlier novels with, this time, no stagey debates. Arctic ...”