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“... Given Dun’s poetic manifesto, based on a reading of Blake, an interpretation of the pattern of hills and rivers, the events of 7 July can be seen as the inevitable consequence of our refusal to remember, our communal amnesia. Blake’s city of gold, its pillars aligned with London topography, has been wilfully set aside. The legends of Chatterton and ...”

“... ruins, the exploration of geographical and social wastelands. Some, following in the footsteps of Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea, see the Northern towns as horrors. Others, indignant at the haemorrhage of jobs and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native ...”

“... so I’ve decided to stop being one. After a while we got his new business card: Lanchester Jean-Paul Monet. You’re getting more French, we said, but you can’t speak French. I’m working on it, he said: the key lifestyle decision is the name change. You have to call me ‘Lanchester’ now. What with work, Arthur, the gym, the shooting classes and ...”

“... classes click like castanets. He lands a big one right out of the box when he pounces on Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd after it was rejected up and down publishers’ row: Podhoretz spots it as a zeitgeist mover and serialises in Commentary to a rousing welcome. ‘The Goodman pieces, so fresh in outlook and so surprising to come upon in ...”

“... celebrity hairdresser, marrying the actress Lesley Ann Warren and sleeping his way around Beverly Hills. He had been telling people for years that he cut Streisand’s hair, but they met for the first time when she wanted a short wig in For Pete’s Sake (1974). Streisand, forever running late, kept him waiting at her house for 45 minutes.Finally my assistant ...”

“... pestering’ his father, they moved three times more, higher into the new city and the hills each time, until in 1934 they arrived at the further reaches of Carrer de Balmes, where Tàpies lived until 1954, the year he got married. In his work Tàpies would become obsessed with old furniture, with the poetics of tables and chairs and doors that had ...”

“... open to the secretary of state were financial, and as punishment for the IRA’s theft of £26.5m, Paul Murphy announced on 10 March that Sinn Féin would be stripped of parliamentary allowances for Westminster worth £400,000. The next evening I drive to Moortown, a Republican area outside Cookstown, on the west side of Lough Neagh. There are pockets of ...”

“... an island. Leicester is at the mouth of a vast inlet stretching west all the way to the Malvern Hills. Oxford is fathoms down. The west and north of Britain are recognisable, but eastern England has vanished. Watford and Kingston-upon-Thames are coastal towns, straining to see each other across the broad, deep channel covering London. Sussex, Kent and Essex ...”

“... in his life. He is an easily quoted exemplar for standup comics like Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, Paul Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld, whose subject is the vicissitudes of the instincts and whose stock in trade is the fast one-liner. These performers are more routinely transgressive than Groucho was, and they lack the pathos that was the undersong of his ...”

“... Alinksy, the Chicago-based community activist and author of Rules for Radicals (1971), Mark and Paul Engler (This Is an Uprising, 2016) and Srdja Popovic, the Serbian advocate of ‘laughtivism’ (Blueprint for Revolution, 2015): XR insists that its interventions should both be fun and poke fun. Gene Sharp, the author of The Politics of Non-Violent Action ...”

“... been friends with Wordsworth and Coleridge – he described them, rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s ...”

“... no idea what their procedures were. That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labour was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.’ Close to Wilde’s release date, the governor of Reading Gaol said to Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a ...”

“... de Heredia, who at the turn of the century dreamt of the coral reefs and azure seas and verdant hills he saw in his native Santiago de Cuba – but wrote of them in French Alexandrines in Paris. Or Italo Calvino, born in a village near Havana but raised in Rome. But there have been some important artists born in Cuba who stayed in the country, like those ...”