“... The first time I went to Chile, while General Pinochet was still under arrest in Britain, it seemed wise while I was in Santiago to read books about him discreetly. Early on the hot, clear summer mornings, I would cross the screeching road outside my hotel, pass through an elaborate wrought-iron gate, and walk up Cerro Santa Lucia, a steep wooded hill in the centre of the capital ...”

“... In January 1978, the Sex Pistols, then and now the most famous punk band in the world, split up. Johnny Rotten, the band’s singer, most unstable musical element, and most adored and reviled member, had had enough. For the next nine months he largely disappeared from view, except for a promise to the music press that he would return with a new band who would be ‘anti-music of any kind ...”

“... For those inclined to ponder the state of the BBC, and of British television in general, the performance of Panorama has long been a favoured indicator. In January 1955, not much more than a year after the current affairs programme began broadcasting, the Sunday Times declared: ‘Panorama is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with television.’ Yet within five years, the Daily Mail was praising the programme for establishing investigative television as a British broadcasting genre: Panorama has become an unbreakable Monday night fixture for between six and eight million people … The current muster has Robin Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion ...”

“... The headquarters​ of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) is a basement room beneath a dry cleaner’s in Central London. From a loading bay behind a row of shops, concrete steps lead down to a flimsy door, with a pile of leaflets beside it and ‘IWGB office’ scribbled above it on a piece of A4. Behind the door is a whitewashed space with metal shelves, neatly stacked with placards and furled banners, and four desks ...”

“... a determining effect on what it meant to be ‘left’ or ‘right’ in the ensuing two decades. Andy Beckett was born a few months before the moment I have just described, and I am stirred and astonished at his brilliance, and by the imaginative sympathy with which he rekindles the arguments and emotions of a period he never knew.For many people ...”

“... are of myself becoming richer, but it remains a popular view: Britain before the fun got going. As Andy Beckett writes in his introduction, the statement ‘Above all, we don’t want to go back to the 1970s’ has been a relentless theme in British political life almost since the day the decade ended. They are the bogeyman years, regularly invoked by ...”

“... 18th century, to its poorest ones poisoning themselves with heroin at the close of this one.’ As Andy Beckett observed in the LRB (10 May 2012), this sort of thing was new for Welsh, the beginning of a punt, maybe, at ‘the great Edinburgh novel’, though he doesn’t seem to have taken it further. And it sounds like a stretch, that ‘line from ...”

“... have to vote for me’. She won. Nearly four decades later, she still sits as a Labour MP.None of Andy Beckett’s other ‘searchers’ – stalwarts of the Labour left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to ...”

“... As recently as six weeks ago, the answer would have been yes, definitely. ‘British politics,’ Andy Beckett wrote in the Guardian last October, ‘feels relentlessly tabloid-dominated. From the daily obsession with immigrants to the rubbishing of human rights lawyers, from the march towards a “hard Brexit” to the smearing of liberal Britons as bad ...”

“... that I’d found somebody whose personal history in that place reached back so deep? In 2005, Andy Beckett wrote in the Guardian about the then novel middle-class English fashion for Englishness – ‘the feverish popularity of beach huts, and of knobbly local potatoes at farmers’ markets, the rebranding of fish and chips and sausages and mash as ...”

“... meum’; Joyce at a fancy-dress party where he managed to wangle first prize dressed as Handy Andy, Joyce reciting Yeats and saying, ‘No Surrealist poet can ever equal this for imagination’; Joyce commenting on a picture of the Christ-child, ‘Doesn’t he look as if he had just robbed the hen-house’; Joyce weeping over his beloved daughter ...”

“... concept of the ‘infra-thin’, like mist on glass, or the warmth of a seat just vacated. Samuel Beckett wrote in The Unnameable: ‘It is all very well to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.’ They are all, it turns out, a little different, and none of them pure or (as Susan Sontag put it) raw. Among the artists in ...”

“... of the contradictory manifestations of Modernist effort – how does one reconcile Thomas Mann and Andy Warhol? – he can’t help but see the Modernist instinct as essentially an affirmative urge. Two-thirds of the way through his book, Gay states bluntly that ‘liberalism’ was the ‘fundamental principle of Modernism’. But whose liberalism is he ...”

“... replied. During this period Kenner published two books on T.S. Eliot, a critical study of Samuel Beckett and The Pound Era, his masterwork (to which Davenport provided considerable input, including the gnomic final sentence: ‘Thought is a labyrinth’), along with several other books, including The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy which had delightful ...”

“... are powerful statements from Ernst Bloch, who gives Clark his minatory title, and Samuel Beckett, who underscores the alien aspect in Cézanne that intrigues Clark. Above all, as Clark debates these others, he argues with himself, and though he often gathers his readers into the ‘we’ of his thinking, he sometimes imagines them as potential ...”