“... feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their ...”

“... New York Sun ran a sensational scoop: the ‘Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant ...”

“... openly in France, and Paris had become the undisputed scientific capital of the world. Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique céleste, which described the origins and motions of the solar system in five volumes without once mentioning God, could never have been published in Britain. Mary Somerville’s On the Connection of the Physical Sciences ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... almost Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... Nearer home, the continued intractability of the Northern Ireland conflict has led Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, to condemn the current initiative by the British and Irish Governments to hold new talks on the province for its ‘centralism’. Instead, Jenkins offers the prospect of devolution to ethnic enclaves, the Catholic ones being ...”

“... in which we hear a great deal about the Saint-Simonians but very little about the ideas of Saint-Simon. A work of genius troubles the professional historian. He is happy to describe the social situation out of which it arose and its diffusion as a political force, but its power to move men across the centuries, like gravity in empty space, disturbs his sense ...”

“... Unlike the runic folk outpourings of Bob Dylan, or the sophisticated musical meditations of Paul Simon, Springsteen’s rocking songs sounded a new reportorial note of decline and defiance. ‘To move forward, we’d have to willingly wear the weight of our unreconciled past. A day of personal and historical accountability had arrived,’ he says of the ...”

“... years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they ...”

“... registered in Consett, a depressed former mining town in County Durham. Working with Wirecard was Simon Dowson, a 26-year-old local with, by his own account, four GCSEs. He recruited hundreds of people in and around the town to act as directors for hundreds of shell companies, signing forms and forwarding paperwork, but otherwise having no connection to the ...”

“... that pop music isn’t as good as it used to be, that commercialism has taken over. But some, like Simon Reynolds and Greil Marcus, emerge with their enthusiasms undiluted and are able to explore the links between the memorable moments and the groundbreaking acts, serving as a corrective to the inclination to see pop music as a series of unconnected ...”

“... public could watch serious debate between historical experts. Now they listen to the platitudes of Simon Schama or watch David Starkey astride the gun barrel of a tank pontificating about Henry VIII. Blair Worden, leading revisionist and elder statesman of 17th-century political history, is on record as worrying that ‘public life has never been less ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”