“... he generates in bed. I began my father’s family tree for his 70th birthday, following a line of Henry Herbert Lights (masons and bricklayers to a man) back to Shrewton, a village in Wiltshire. Genealogy often gets short shrift from professional historians; it’s seen as self-indulgent and myopic, obsessed with the idea of origins. But as the branches ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and revisions and adaptations of Shakespeare have been, from Tate to Aimé Césaire and Tom Stoppard, they have not been carried out in recent years with the same pointed zeal as have the sequels to Austen. In the 20th century dozens of sequels, from Margaret Dashwood, or Interference (a sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte ...”

“... the true story (or true-ish: there is a tacked-on happy ending) of a jazz musician, played by Henry Fonda, who is wrongly accused of armed robbery and put through a nightmarish sequence of police interrogations and legal proceedings which feel more like Kafka than Hitchcock. I found it haunting, compulsive and intensely depressing, and didn’t watch it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”