“... On one occasion I drove a car through a brick wall.’ In the mid-1990s, Gary’s life was saved by new antiretroviral treatments. He had also been infected with hepatitis C, however, and both conditions continued to undermine his health. Contaminated blood products, he said, had ‘ruined his life’.Colin Smith’s parents were told their son had HIV when ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground ...”

“... Day 1879, he made a note rather than a resolution: ‘A perception of the failure of things to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the intended interest, a new and greater interest of an unintended kind.’The opening line of Wessex Poems includes a coinage, ‘chancefulness’, which raises a question ...”

“... out to the horizon. There was transparent sheeting as a guard against the frost, played about by a shimmer of soft artificial lights. What was this? Was it Art? Nature? Some kind of installation? And what did all those identical Enos smell like?Eno has haunted me for more than fifty years, ever since I first saw Roxy Music on Top of the Pops in 1972 ...”

“... late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a let-the-poor-be-poor crusade, a Campaign for ...”

“... Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), embedded its style of postcolonial governance by resisting its enemies at home and abroad, and distributing largesse to loyal members of the movement. Its Marxism-Leninism is a thing of the past, after an abrupt about-turn in 1990, as Soares de Oliveira, an associate professor in African politics at ...”

“... with these women was unclear, but his delight in telling the tale of sexual encounters which, by his account, could only be sadistic on the part of the man and painful for the women involved, was repellent. He was boasting. Doubtless he thought he was promoting their case. He registered my disapproval. Twice I declined ...”

“... river on the other side, but since she hated water that was fine. Sometimes a fishing boat chugged by at high tide and looked down on her red brick terrace.One evening in early December 2013 Waters was at home, feeling she’d bested the Christmas run-in. The holiday food was bought and she’d steam-cleaned the carpets. There’d been a story about east coast ...”

“... just propaganda. At about that moment, 300 kilometres to the east, a 12-tonne missile – designed by a former member of the BIS’s German sister society, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt – left the ground carrying a one-tonne high-explosive warhead. The party in the pub shook their heads over the technological defeatism of the Americans: the missile rose out ...”

“... much from XR, and whatever they were 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 ...”

“... paper of some kind, with a mix of local and national and international news, comfortably financed by cover price and advertising. During the day, on the way to work, in the workplace, in the canteen, there would be news on the radio, or continued picking over the carcass of the paper. In the evening, there would ...”

“... appointed the UK’s first ‘free speech tsar’. The position – Ahmed’s official title will be director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations ...”

“... other quality. This is the only spirit in which the history of the Communist movement can properly be understood, particularly in its pre-Cold War heyday. About Turn is a tough book to read, even for those of us who maintain a perverse fascination with the affairs of the British Communist Party (and what a surprisingly large number of us there are – a ...”

“... reason was Johnson’s ‘supreme enjoyment’, any threat to that faculty was ‘the evil most to be dreaded’: ‘He fancied himself seized by it [insanity], or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgment.’ Johnson’s Bolt Court household was ...”

“... that not merely Rolls-Royce and British Leyland and the National Freight Corporation would be privatised ten years later, but that the telephones and the gas industry would be too, with water and electricity on the Parliamentary agenda and even coal, the railways and the Post Office in the Government’s sights? That ...”