“... cassette player’. Typographical tricks suit satirists such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who seem to be graffiti-spraying billboards with impudent brio, deploying jazzy effects (italics, caps, boldface, exclamation marks, dashes) to fill a wide canvas. They’re performance artists in print. Pynchon, too. Moody is more of a heartbreak ...”

“... tired of ‘moral liberty’ and, unable to find Darrelhyde, runs towards the assistant keeper, Tom, with relief and joy. Tom, however, is armed and takes aim ‘with classic correctness’, remembering the ‘joy of sharing a manly pursuit with his father’. As Percy dies, he sees a vision of the Professor as a dazzling ...”

“... men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie ...”

“... as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I contributed the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at Edinburgh, had ...”

“... a command of large parts of human time and space, Runciman approvingly reviews Marquez, commends Henry James, discusses some ‘splendid stuff’ from Tom Wolfe and starts a chapter with Angela Carter on rooms by the hour in Japan. If this is social science, it is in style and scope not social science as we have come to ...”

“... to Measure and ‘Lucrece’, dominates Act II. Elsewhere, the text is less Shakespearean, but Henry V keeps coming to mind: in the opening argument about Edward’s rights in France, the patriotic roll-call of foreign dead, and elaborate, descriptive accounts of war. Published in 1596, and completed one supposes not long before, it’s a central if ...”

“... also need to be understood on their own terms. Smith’s disciples, Pitt the Younger and Henry Dundas, whom conventional historiography labels as Tory and who led the forces of anti-Jacobin reaction during the 1790s, supported liberal reform in the 1780s, never abjured Whiggery and went on to champion the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Not only did ...”

“... racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an ...”

“... said, ‘that when we had hardly been a year wearing broadcloth at court in mourning for King Henry II, silks had already sunk so low in everyone’s opinion that if you saw anyone dressed in them you immediately set them down as a bourgeois.’ Though the copywriters would like to have us believe that one instinctively knows when something is right, in ...”

“... rather than men in grey suits to get out its message. It used endorsements from the boxer Henry Cooper and the gold medal-winning Olympic pentathlete Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to ...”

“... was my master.’ Ten years later he said his father might have been a mulatto. In other words, as Henry Louis Gates put it, Douglass ‘completely diminished the whiteness and the masterness of his father over ten years’. In his 1854 essay ‘The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered’, Douglass stated baldly that ‘intellect is uniformly derived ...”

“... the progress of human improvement”.’ But, apart from the elevated tone, that is plain Tom Paine talk, to be found in any reform publication of the time. Then Roe tells the reader, some thirty pages on, that the scheme for the Philanthropist was ‘never realised’. Wordsworth, writing to Mathews on 7 November 1794, had agreed that they must ...”

“... ambiguity, because it confounds moral life with doctrine or dogma. We need only the reminder of Henry James, who, while cautioning against any ‘moral restrictions set upon the field of consciousness’, affirmed the moral character of art: ‘to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if ...”

“... him in one or another species of white condescension Either he would have to reinforce the Uncle Tom figure smiling through his suffering in All God’s chillun and (repeatedly) Show Boat, or unwittingly valorise the sentiments of British Imperialism in the Korda brothers’ film of Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River. Then there was Othello, also written ...”

“... ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in the love-act and simultaneous orgasm, are passed down from master or mistress to hand-picked pupil in certain rare and long-delayed bouts of ...”