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“... Basil Bunting, and who else? In a tight spot Wall-ace Stevens appealed to the famous line from ‘Michael’, ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (drawing from it unwarrantable inferences, as Robinson points out): but Stevens’s admirers know they are on safer ground if they appeal to Coleridge or Keats, Blake Or Emerson. It takes some nerve, in ...”

“... be sorry if it pleased you.’ The film’s opening scene, which culminates in a close-up of a straight-edge razor being drawn through a woman’s eyeball, is often taken as the epitome of cinema’s potential to do violence to its audience. The suasions of rhetoric, the effects of art on the observer, are of course achieved by inflicting pain as well as ...”

“... and of Dr Wyatt saying: “If you dare to take your child out of the hospital she will be placed straight into care.” A place of safety order was obtained this day and the mother said: “[that evening] I arrived home and opened the door to find a place of safety order on my doormat.” ’ This is the kind of material which above all incensed the British ...”

“... privacy (which goes much wider than confidentiality). When the early human rights claim brought by Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones over the intrusion into their wedding reception of a pirate photographer who sold his pictures to Hello! magazine came before the Court of Appeal, I suggested that the common law governing confidentiality had matured to a ...”

“... keep surgeries and hospices busy in the future. The Environment Agency fed the relevant minister, Michael Meacher, the usual soft soap. The firms responsible for working mixed ash into conglomerates used to surface new roads declined to reveal the locations of their handiwork, the 12,000 tonnes of aggregate dropped on the landscape. Their spokesman, sweating ...”

“... cleaned, and gave out all the light they possessed. Sleighs, crowded with people, slid along the straight road to the station, dropped their dark cargo, curved elegantly to a stop, blue smoke came out of the horses’ nostrils, their hooves cracked on the ice, impatiently they whinnied, the coachmen rubbed their hands and smacked their shoulders, people ...”

“... vestige of reticence or shame) was the petit mal, dread of whose grand sequel blighted his life. Michael Thorn opens with a deferential salutation to ‘Professor Martin’s magisterial biography’. This is, however, decoy fire. What follows is a prolonged undermining of The Unquiet Heart (often without naming the author or his book). Thorn has many bones ...”

“... despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s ...”

“... sense of Jewish identity. Dropping out of the University of Wisconsin after three days, he walked straight into a newspaper job in Chicago. He learned there that ‘the leaders of causes were scoundrels. Morality was a farce full of murder, rapes and love nests. Swindlers ran the world and the devil sang everywhere. These discoveries filled me with a great ...”

“... Few previous far-right jamborees had boasted such a deep roster of senior British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... regard the depletion of reserves as growth. This definitional standpoint cuts the cackle and goes straight to the claims of future generations.Heavily discounting the claims of the future amounts to ‘impatience’, or the sin denounced elsewhere as ‘greed’. But how much should the future be discounted? After summarising the arguments, the authors come ...”

“... musings (give them an inch and they’ll take an ell) which do indeed look like improvisations, straight from the stream of consciousness. Here is a Russian at the improvisers’ prize-giving: ‘I get phases like tonight when I’d love to fuck almost every woman I see. Look at that magnificent, fat, blowsy frau dancing with the Pole. God, I’d love to ...”

“... had been written about teatime behaviour: what the world required was sex talk, to set things straight. Unfortunately, the injunction to talk about sex is even less likely to produce full accuracy than the command to silence. Those who dare not speak the name of sex can allude to it, at least; those compelled to sex talk bring the rest of life in only as ...”

“... is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in which he concludes that although speeches are briefer and politicians a ...”