“... true that he has found himself in this position by a mixture of chance and opportunism. The same may apply to much of the contemporary Russian political establishment, but he, more than most, has exploited a difficult situation with great skill and ruthlessness. It is now clear that the challenge he mounted to the Presidency, and the counter-challenge ...”

“... the volume was not so interpreted by contemporaries on its appearance in September 1798, when it may actually have disappointed radical expectations. The first name on the title page was that of the out-of-town publisher Joseph Cottle of Bristol. It’s an odd fact that Cottle authors – the youthful Southey and Coleridge alone, together, or in conjunction ...”

“... 1945? Culturally, economically and socially the answers might be yes – ‘structuralists’ may even speculate about a slow process of liberalisation analogous to Spain’s, albeit without the push of turismo. But politically that outcome was always impossible because Nazi Germany was Hitler’s Germany, and Hitler wanted war even more than he wanted ...”

“... who started moving in their own directions after the Sex Pistols showed the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck of stories less mythical perhaps ...”

“... the combined effect of thousands of tiny perceptual connections, microscopic hooks and eyes. His may be the first prose style to be influenced by Velcro. The self-enclosure of his narrators (Baker has yet to risk a third person) is very striking. A surprising amount could be conveyed about the books in which they appear by renaming them, as if they were ...”

“... gone to Saudi Arabia, leaving a broken marriage behind? One or other of her conversation partners may be responsible. There are brief excursions from the central dialogues: one to the old lady’s husband, Robert, who hears a susurrus of women’s voices in his flat in Positano. Beneath the old woman’s bedroom, by a convex mirror (whose symbolism is ...”

“... Kanfer shrugs off one of the darkest and most disturbing episodes in American history. He cites Richard Brooks’s suggestion that ‘Bogie was never the same again’ after his renunciation of the First Amendment Committee, and says: ‘This smacks of the kind of romantic wish-dream that stayed with the Old Left for decades, crystallised in a film called ...”

“... the years appeared to confirm the Soviet image: his Third Symphony (1930) was entitled First of May and a Soviet music journal reported him as saying in 1940 that ‘to write a symphony immortalising Lenin’s name’ had always been his ‘cherished dream’ (though he never did write one). His enormously successful Seventh (‘Leningrad’) Symphony ...”

“... drifts on for a couple of hours through photogenic wilderness. Man in the Wilderness, which stars Richard Harris, is Woodstock-era to the core: the hero’s wounds more or less heal themselves, enabling him to undertake a spot of anthropological fieldwork on Native American practices on the way home and, even more bizarrely, to adopt a white rabbit with a ...”

“... symbol of the vacant crossroads Though Cunard didn’t write the best modernist long poem, she may at least be in with a chance in the ‘Best Modernist Title’ category. The parallax effect is defined by Thomas Browne in the poem’s epigraph: ‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper ...”

“... his meat into his room’, although the author, mindful of ‘my mother and father who may come across this book’, tells us that what transpired would be ‘better experienced than heard’. The pair get married but Mabel, having tasted her first man, must taste others because ‘I don’t get what I want out of life by tying myself down.’ By ...”

“... passions of a distinctly non-Redmondite sort still to be found in the party. In a speech of 11 May 1916 he condemned the execution of the rebel leaders and the large number of often indiscriminate arrests carried out under martial law. They were damaging to British interests in Ireland: ‘If Ireland were governed by men out of Bedlam you could not pursue ...”

“... had briefly worked for them as a freelance copywriter, and a friend gave him an address for Richard Branson, who was impressed by his demo tape and offered him a multi-album deal. Johnson had the foresight to turn it down, agreeing only to one album. (He would subsequently sign to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... even very recently, was attached to any admitted departure from sexual regularity. The fact that Richard Crossman lost an Oxford fellowship for having a divorce, and was not the last fellow to do so, is one which is now received with general incredulity. The fact that it is now perfectly safe, for example, for a couple to admit that they live together when ...”