“... of smack’. Here is Javo, ‘just back from getting off dope in Hobart’, Lou, Selena, Georgie, Clive, Eve, Gracie – and a little boy called ‘the Roaster’ who seems to belong to no one and everyone. There are no introductions, just intimacies that rise sharply above the clatter only to sink back into it. The drama of Monkey Grip is ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... between hand and machine are difficult to recover. In different ways, Warhol, Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke produce a related conundrum of the painterly and the photographic; it is a prime characteristic of Pop art at its best.Lichtenstein’s work abounds in manually made signs of mechanically reproduced images, but ...”

“... on me, I set to work. When Hanson left Birmingham, Tara Prem inherited the project. She and Pedr James, the script editor, made numerous suggestions for improvement and the play’s final shape owes a lot to them. My intention was to take a television cliché – a kind of family reunion, a dinner party – and to transform it by degrees and by logical ...”

“... individual in Britain; and only three other politicians, William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and North, featured in prints more. Yet, as Robinson points out, before 1778 visual representations of Burke were rare: and this is suggestive. In retrospect, Burke’s speeches in the 1760s and early 1770s, warning of deteriorating British relations ...”

“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all ...”

“... as its ‘political and poetic undertones’ really ‘passed him by’. He was at Stowe when James Gibbs built the Temple of Liberty. This curious triangular, turreted, ironstone building with battlements on the outside and elaborate spurious heraldry on the inside, connecting Lord Cobham with his Saxon ancestors and their ancient freedoms, was the ...”

“... my peers were conceived. ‘The town used to double, treble, quadruple in size in summer,’ said Clive Hart, one of Cliftonville’s Labour councillors. ‘Birmingham used to close down and send everybody here for a fortnight. I was born in a council house a mile from the sea. In the summer months my mum had to put a sign in the window saying “No ...”

“... begun to settle in the region. It was, after all, the collapse of French power in India following Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 which effectively opened it up to British dominance: as Browning was to put it, ‘the man Clive – he fought Plassey, spoiled the clever/foreign game,/Conquered and annexed and ...”

“... sharply distinguish itself from fascism, and ‘saw the force of the Marxist analysis’. The late James Klugmann, in an introductory essay, proclaims the achievements of the period: ‘it is a great compliment that people who are reactionary fear it so much.’ Margot Heinemann writes with exceptional authority on MacNeice, John Cornford and ...”

“... as a replacement for it. ‘I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything,’ says Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, ‘because I can instantly retrieve the information online.’ David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, writes: ‘I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realised ...”

“... example Whichelo/Honeychurch, Lily/Lilia and, in Maurice, Ernest Merz/Maurice Hall and Max Garnett/Clive Durham.’ Given these criteria of resemblance, the names of Augustus Hervey and Cecil Vyse are not ‘quite dissimilar’, so Morgan may have seen his tutor Mr Hervey, who, like Cecil Vyse, wore ‘eyeglasses and a moustache’, trying to kiss his ...”

“... Despite ambitious promises, they never delivered. Most of them seemed to think it did not matter. James Callaghan, for example, believed that all the fuss about open government and the like was something got up by the chattering classes, and of no interest at all to his working-class constituents, who had more important matters on their minds. He may have ...”

“... of the sentences seem tackier than it would in a Chandler story. Somewhere in the background is James M. Cain, the author of the novel on which the film is based. And the actual writer here, the one who finally approved the words even if he didn’t compose them, is Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and co-author of the script. ‘He was a ...”

“... Freud is frequently called upon in footnotes but the judgments in the text owe more to Polonius: James I invents the Divine Right of Kings ‘to salve his own sense of inadequacy’; his love of hunting and his son’s artistic collections were both symptoms of repressed sexual drives; Laud was obviously less secure in his faith than Charles I because he had ...”