“... girls who had skived off school to shout obscenities about Blair’s decision to go to war. In May 1978 it was the assembly point for the seven thousand Bangladeshis who marched behind Ali’s coffin to Downing Street. Young people in the area were beginning to distance themselves from their parents, whom they had come to see as passive. Their mothers were ...”

“... the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de ...”

“... on to Marx, Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci. ‘Quote marks’ round words, when ‘concepts’ may be ‘novel’. Italics – lots of them – when something is important and the teachers want to make sure you’re getting it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since ...”

“... is an attribute which is almost never applicable to performing musicians. However great they may be, they have no importance. To understand why Gould was the exception to this rule, we need to look at what it was that he, as the Nichtakzeptierer (to use Bernhard’s word), did not accept.An advertisement for Yamaha pianos has the headline ‘Performing ...”

“... parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons. Yorkshire, 29 March. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this ...”

“... planning for the early summer has been postponed indefinitely by the onset of Covid-19. The virus may have changed the game, but not the preoccupations of environmentalists. To many, it presages the difficulties that climate change has in store for us; it will bring us to our senses, they hope, and force us into a massive salvage operation that protects our ...”

“... and the fate of the Jews. But the lessons I draw from them, the ways I see them combined, may not – by the end – be those most obviously expected. Because of Dreyfus, therefore Israel. It is an argument that many find unanswerable: the crimes perpetrated by the French state against the Jewish officer heralded, for those who could hear, the end of ...”

“... to Marseille to teach. Sartre proposed to her so that they wouldn’t have to be separated. ‘I may say that not for one moment was I tempted to fall in with his suggestions,’ Beauvoir writes in The Prime of Life, adding that ‘the task of preserving my independence was not particularly onerous; I would have regarded it as highly artificial to equate ...”

“... that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion. With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... where of them’? Was she not manifestly a writer ‘for whom places loom large’? The problem may have been that place in itself does not loom large in the novels and stories. Bowen’s North Cork is not a mythical terrain like Hardy’s Wessex. What matters, rather, is a relation of person to place – created as much in expectation and memory as in ...”

“... a pillow’. Kauffman, whose large classical scenes are evidence of her mastery of the human form, may have studied statuary, plaster casts, other artists’ drawings or, as later rumour had it, an obliging male model, Charles Cranmer – who claimed that he visited her house to sit, with her father present, chastely ‘expos[ing] his arms, shoulders and ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”