“... and ‘hospital building is not like pyramid building, the erection of memorials.’ There was no longer any plausible function for most of these vast complexes, and reform should ‘err on the side of ruthlessness’. The mental healthcare of the future would take place in general hospitals, and the number of beds would be halved, with care in the local ...”

“... the Heights takes place there, and Heathcliff as a kind of diabolical man-woman-cook who touches no food is more closely identified with it than with the moors, or with his machinations against the Earnshaw family, or even with Catherine. The real secret of Wuthering Heights may be its fierce and compelling fantasy and metamorphosis of the passions and rages ...”

“... Mr Primakov, his jolly proletarian bounce temporarily deserting him, left Baghdad Airport. He had no plans to return. The talk in the British and American Embassies was of war by the fourth week in November. I found myself looking out of the window again. From the television screen there came a blare of trumpets. A man on a magnificent white stallion was ...”

“... the top of the greasy pole of academic life, represented by the Disraeli Fellowship at Holy Christ Hall, Cambridge. He succeeds. But throughout, Sefton comes from behind, not like the victorious dark horse, but like the furtively libidinous dog, taking his pleasures in dark and dirty places. Peeping Tom is set in Cornwall, a place Jacobson has oddly chosen to ...”

“... bright. Our impression would not be wrong, but it would certainly be incomplete. We should have no means of knowing how deeply young Sam was hooked on the hard stuff; nor would we attach significance to the fact that Sara dropped the coffee tray, in what seemed an uncharacteristic outbreak of clumsiness, and slightly scalded her husband’s foot. The ...”

“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... age. The incident is remarkable because the man was Lytton Strachey and he wasn’t joking. No Bloomsbury raspberry here. The famous debunker of eminent Victorians was handing out a bouquet to the most eminently Victorian of them all. He’d been hooked ever since he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor ...”

“... troubled-intolerable-her-own-worst-enemy diva cliché, it’s quite strange that there has been no substantial account of her life until now, apart from a highly unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the ...”

“... where the real playwright J.M. Synge lived and the fictional Stephen Dedalus pissed against the hall door – unless, as he says, it was Mulligan. (‘—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.’) And this is another example of Joyce pitching bodily against literary product, to transgressive effect. His concern with the body’s ...”

“... Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, two young cross-dressers who were put on trial in Westminster Hall in 1871. Cross-dressing was not a criminal offence, so the men were charged instead with outraging public decency. On the slightest of pretexts, the prosecution also threw in ‘the abominable crime of buggery’, along with conspiracy to incite others to do ...”

“... yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September 1974. Images of Shankar – sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing his sitar – have become synonymous with Indian classical music, yet when his story is told it too often focuses on his starry associations. Through his friendship with ...”

“... unionists and Italian Marxists were forever dropping in on his house in Spitalfields, which Stuart Hall recalled as a ‘sort of permanently open unofficial conference centre with some informal seminar always in permanent session in the kitchen’. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical ...”

“... institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in the same way. Both writers ...”

“... the story here of a previous Australian Labor leader who told Margaret Whitlam, his wife, that no one would ever get him going to South-East Asia: ‘You never know what you’ll catch.’ Mr Whitlam, by contrast, is rarely happier than when abroad. He translated the menu for me in Sofia, discoursing on the etymology of some of its words, recommended a ...”

“... Among other certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine had no chance against ‘literary’ authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted for Martyn Goff’s real thing ...”