“... In​ 1948, George Grosz sat for a portrait by Stanley Kubrick, then a young photographer for Look magazine. Grosz sits astride a backwards desk chair in the middle of light pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue. Neatly dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes, with a very slight smile, Grosz looks as though he’s conquering New York, as he did Berlin ...”

“... systems; others still devoted to writers and artists – Goya, James Baldwin, Updike, Greene, George Eliot and, alas, P.G. Wodehouse. None of the essays is uninteresting and many of them have the virtues of the best kind of journalism – they tell you things you did not know and are unlikely to find out in more conventional quarters. Henry Kissinger is ...”

“... On the evening of 26 April 1937, George Lowther Steer, a correspondent for the Times, was having dinner with other reporters at the Torrontegui Hotel in Bilbao. Sometime after nine, a distraught Basque official rushed into the dining-room: ‘Guernica is destroyed,’ he told them. The town was still burning when the journalists got there ...”

“... the hoped-for improvements which sent forty thousand or so foreign volunteers to fight in Spain. George Green, who went with his wife, wrote to his mother explaining why they were there just a few weeks before he was killed on the Ebro:We came to war because we love peace and hate war . . . Fascism can be decisively beaten in Spain & if it is beaten in Spain ...”

“... as from the more recent New Romanticism of 1940s poetry. Younger writers, taking their tone from Orwell as well as from Leavis and Empson, were adopting tougher attitudes and plainer idioms. ‘The Movement,’ Scott wrote, launching the capitalised noun on its successful career, ‘as well as being anti-phoney, is ...”

“... early 1960s.The subcultural change that led to the demise of this aesthetic was, according to George Melly, signalled by a ‘secret society’ that congregated at the party for the V&A’s Aubrey Beardsley exhibition in the summer of 1966. The next future would be looking backwards. Archigram’s architectural collages had always included ‘dolly ...”

“... This, too, is in the main a political narrative: a struggle for mastery between Asquith, Lloyd George, Baldwin, MacDonald, Chamberlain and Churchill. Other topics were included here and there. But as he remarked in a comment on the problem of constructing general histories: ‘political history provides the acts of the drama; and the rest ...”

“... Twist was ‘the TRUTH!’ Even Tolstoy needed at times to make the same point. Henry James or George Eliot, on the other hand, never give the impression that the question could arise: the distinction was not part of their artistic outlook or method. But as a touchstone it is still very much around, and can take unexpected forms. Importunity about truth ...”

“... for performance. The history of the essay – from Hazlitt on his first acquaintance with poets to Orwell on the sex life of the common toad – is the history of writers taking a break from other forms in order, not to ask themselves que sais-je? but simply to strut their stuff. Hardly anybody has done that to better effect than Gore Vidal, whose essays are ...”

“... better known and loved than Forster himself, though here having to answer to the first name ‘George’, perhaps by contamination from the actor George Arliss, once, but no longer, famous. In discussing the contents of the book it might be best to begin by disposing of Appendix A, which is devoted to 11 poems, mostly ...”

“... In October 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have supported anti-totalitarian movements from Poland’s Solidarity to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, as well as countless other organisations that promote human rights ...”

“... Rocker and any anti-Bolshevik Marxists he could find. He also managed to find a British edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which wasn’t published in the US until after the Second World War. Orwell celebrated the anarchists in Barcelona, who had been opposed by both the Americans and the Soviets. Struck by the ...”

“... chips as by roast beef. He might have added that the ‘sandal-wearing vegetarians’ scorned by Orwell are almost as recognisably English a type as the beef-gobbling John Bull. He might have compared the English beef fetish to those of other nations – Argentina, say, or Japan, with its beloved Kobe cattle. He would have inquired closely into the diet of ...”

“... Inimitable. In his essay on Dickens, remarkable for its combination of admiration and perplexity, Orwell points out that for all Dickens’s generous involvement in social issues and endless speeches at charity dinners, there’s little representation or understanding of the world of work in his novels, or of the working class; the characters are intensely ...”

“... Faith in Europe seems to be another area in which Stonehouse’s idealism has died. According to Orwell, if most novel reviewers were honest they would have to say: ‘I have no thoughts whatsoever about this novel.’ Had Ralph been written anonymously, it would be a nullity. As it is, one reads it, almost hating oneself, for the piquancy of passages like ...”