“... scholarly tasks of editing Milton and of compiling a student anthology of critical essays about Andrew Marvell, experiences that awoke him to the full horror of academic Lit Crit: ‘researching these two books made me resolve never to write such stuff myself, and to deride it whenever I came across it.’ Much of the introduction to the Marvell collection ...”

“... happen,’ even though there has been an increase in the number of wars. Later in the same volume Andrew Linklater maintained that ‘there is no doubt that globalisation and fragmentation have reduced the modern state’s willingness and capacity to wage the kinds of war which typified the last century.’ America, Britain and some cronies may have lapsed ...”

“... was offered a job by Merrill Lynch, which he turned down on getting an even better offer from Smith Barney. With the money that he earned from them he was able to get another show off the ground, but although the work sold, it still didn’t make a profit – which isn’t perhaps surprising, given what it had cost to cast a life-raft in bronze, for ...”

“... thus instantly plunging Japan and probably the world into depression. The London-based consultant Andrew Smithers calls his gloomy analysis ‘Japan as a Laboratory for Economic Theory’ because no major economy has ever run up such an extraordinary peacetime debt, or had so few ideas about how to ease its burden.Last year, the 171-year-old Sogo Department ...”

“... about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the ...”

“... it off – until Roman Polanski walked in with his usual compliment of nymphets. ‘Roman, this is Andrew Lloyd Webber.’ Time to run. The first chapter of the book, the prison time, was worked through many drafts. It’s the strongest, freshest aspect of the story. You know that Marks wrote it. He’s there, in the narration, not reporting on the video of a ...”

“... launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance ...”

“... members of TCBS were killed on the Western Front: Rob Gilson on the first day of the Somme, G.B. Smith from shell wounds a few months after. ‘My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight . . . there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon,’ Smith had ...”

“... political land-grab. Your browser does not support html5 video. Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith, deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council from September 2017, is asked if the government has been helpful.Headlines seem like wisdom to those who rely on them. ‘Fire Victims Left in Lurch by Chaotic Relief Effort’, ‘Grenfell: The Net Closes ...”

“... placed Ackroyd’s Blake at number three in their non-fiction bestseller list (behind Delia Smith and The Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn.) They glossed the book, for the benefit of readers who had managed to bypass the promotional campaign, as: ‘The supreme Londoner.’ What isn’t clear is whether they were alluding to Blake or to Ackroyd. Because that ...”

“... the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren ...”

“... budgets’. In a cover story, the Atlantic described torture as a ‘necessary evil’. Andrew Sullivan called for the ‘extermination of the enemy in all its forms – relentlessly, constantly, insistently’. Time, Newsweek and the Spectator, as well as the Murdoch-owned media, fervently promoted fantasies of Anglo-American supremacism. In ...”

“... by nearly 50 per cent since 2010, revealed unpopular plans to remove youth services, Iain Duncan Smith was derisive: If you look at the successful local authorities, they are the people who have worked out what the vitally important things are that they do, and have managed to get through this process without savaging the things that really matter. My only ...”

“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”

“... a description of the postwar boom in the OECD zone by Anglo-American economists of the Left – Andrew Glyn, David Gordon and others – and totalised a phase of world history under it. The notion, as always and as he himself concedes, is a retrospective one: treasure discovered after the event. It is amid the rubble of the Landslide that what preceded it ...”