“... Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party. On the other hand, the craze for ethical living relies rather heavily on its own kind of consumerism and being green can seem merely a question of where ...”

“... The Big Issue, the magazine sold on the streets by the homeless, is ten years old this month. The next three issues will describe and celebrate its history; the first of these – available on street corners in almost any town in Britain of any size you care to name – leads with an extract from Tessa Swithinbank’s book Coming up from the Streets: The Story of the ‘Big Issue’ (Earthscan, £12 ...”

“... it is as though a Rembrandt-like stickiness of paint or a Hals-like dash has been multiplied by some large factor.These signals of seriousness in the work are reinforced by what one reads of the life. Auerbach has worked in the same studio for most of it, has used friends and family as models, often painting the same ...”

“... for Iraq that drives them to terrorism’ etc). Yet people talked about them as a ‘joke’. By the end of the year Blair had been contradicted by almost everybody, including the home secretary’s Muslim advisers and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, yet the no-connection routine has been given a new lease of life ...”

“... use his work. His archive of theatre negatives (there is a photograph of him taken in 1968 backed by a wall of shelves neatly stacked with boxes of these plates) was sold to the Harvard Theatre Collection in 1970. In the 1950s, when theatre became less theatrical (he called his unpublished autobiography ‘Look Back in Angus’), pictures which recorded the ...”

“... Independent Labour Party MP, socialist, orator, Scotsman and the subject of a biography written by Gordon Brown twenty years ago – was not a successful leader, although some of his contemporaries in the 1920s thought he might become one. ‘Maxton was never a government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high office ...”

“... car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that ...”

“... the materials that do survive – in particular, the two copies of the Canterbury Tales produced by the same scribe in the early 15th century. We know the scribe was a prolific copyist of Middle English poetry, probably a man called Adam Pinkhurst, and it seems possible that he had some connection to Chaucer. The earlier of the two manuscripts, the so-called ...”

“... neighbourhood of Birmingham was once home to two 100-foot-long swimming pools, designed for use by the city’s working class. Their size – ‘somewhat unusual for an establishment constructed some fifty years ago’, as a 1951 report put it – earned ‘the gratitude of all swimmers’. The Grove Lane Baths closed in 1985, but are recreated in paintings ...”

“... though, needed to rest for 24 hours before it was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.Early in 1966, when I was 23 years old – married, with a baby, and a graduate student at ...”

“... Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt ...”

“... with a promise of star treatment: ‘Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.’ Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece was typical of the general approach to Marx and Marxism. It bowed at a distance to the prophet of capitalism’s ever ‘more extensive and exhaustive crises’, and restated several basic articles of his thought: capitalism ...”

“... to ‘define’ literature: it was the ‘theoretical naivety and innocence of system displayed by the literary establishment’ which made it ‘always vulnerable’ to the demolition which it suffered soon after at the hands of ‘structuralist and post-structuralist theorists’. The witnesses were not ‘defining literature’ but trying conscientiously ...”

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world ...”

“... who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent ...”