“... ideas they’re objecting to as much as the words. That was certainly the case in the furore over Richard Eyre’s film version of Harrison’s poem V. when it was shown on Channel Four with none of its expletives deleted.* Campaigners against the film claimed to be horrified by its vulgar tongue but the vulgarity of the author’s origins and politics were ...”

“... to be a language,’ Johns noted in the early 1960s – or, more precisely, a language game. He read Wittgenstein in the summer of 1961, Philosophical Investigations in particular, but already by 1959 he had let colours and names slip away from one another, and in 1960 he superimposed numbers, 0 through 9, to the point of illegibility. With Fool’s House ...”

“... and started a riot. The transparency was taken down and ‘Concord’ hastily repainted to read ‘Amity’.Unruly elements were always present in the West End, just beyond the pools of light. The shelter of the shopping arcade was useful for soliciting, the gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries ...”

“... unashamedly reclaiming dignity for the low-life ways of Black proletarians. It’s hard not to read such passages as a swipe at the pretensions of Harlem’s Black bourgeoisie, and of the attitudes of the NAACP, which Du Bois helped found. McKay was determined to portray a version of Black life that, as his biographer Wayne Cooper wrote, was ‘far removed ...”

“... and representatives from the world’s liberation movements. Julia Hervé, the daughter of Richard Wright, came from Paris to interpret from English into French. I did the same, into English, for the Cleavers. ‘We are an integral part of Africa’s history,’ Cleaver said at the conference. ‘White America teaches us that our history begins on the ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... trade suffered and men died. The anti-war writers were divided between those like the Radical Richard Price, who saw in America only a beacon of liberation from monarchist and colonial oppression, and those who questioned the meaning of liberty in a society where slavery was still legal. Among the pamphlets and essays Johnson published was an early poem ...”

“... supervised and impeded his every move. I believed I had heard enough about the KGB before I read this book, but the degree of petty vindictiveness and mean cunning disclosed in Sakharov’s memoirs exceeds anything I had imagined. This volume ends in December 1986 when two engineers and a KGB man came to install a telephone in the exiled ...”

“... all this is about and it dispenses In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around But difficult to read correctly since there is No common vantage point, no point of view Like the ‘I’ in a novel. And in truth No one never saw the point of any. Tell that to Henry James. The sonnet poems of Shadow Train have something of the Jamesian absence of ...”

“... mortally ill. He never saw their publication, nor were they published in Russia: he sent them to Richard Gregory in England. They will appear in Gregory’s Oxford Companion to the Mind. Inner difficulties and outer difficulties match each other here. It is not only difficult, it is impossible for patients with certain right-hemisphere syndromes to know ...”

“... not much influenced by Gide because, like many thoughtful young people in different centuries, she read older books and knew of contemporary writers only through the modish fuss surrounding them: her Alexis is the same sort of ‘young fogey’, with his old-fashioned style. Galey says Alexis’s style is glacial. No, she says, it is tremulous. ‘People often ...”

“... separately, Kramer’s articles often seem, and sometimes are, cogent and outspoken. When we have read the whole book, however, we can see that his position is muddled, and far less courageous than he would like us to think. Two characteristics of the art of the Sixties and early Seventies agitate Kramer as they must any serious commentator on modern art. One ...”

“... actors, including a recommendation that their star player should go to London and try to rival Richard Burbage’s performance as Hamlet) but other countries. There are records of a performance by ‘Englische Comoedien’ in Dresden as early as 1626, possibly of the practicably short first quarto text that lies behind the oldest surviving translated ...”

“... Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife (here ‘Skelf’). Before evaluating Smith’s particular achievement in her first novel, it’s worth going a little into the general ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish ...”