“... and Transport workers on the Caledonian Sleeper service out of Glasgow. The picket was visited by Jeremy Corbyn, back to wearing his Lenin cap.‘Transport justice IS climate justice,’ it said on a banner at the RMT picket. ‘Social Justice = Climate Justice’ read a banner carried by the striking Glasgow City Council cleansing and refuse workers at the ...”

“... during the Boer War. Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former ...”

“... Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old boyfriends. But we also think of the places in ...”

“... into a Faragist government. Although there’s little risk of Labour succumbing to Faragism, Jeremy Corbyn, too, is reliant enough on Faragists among formerly loyal Labour voters to feel beholden to them. It can’t be assumed that pressure on Labour to pander to Faragism will go away once Brexit is resolved. The Attlee years of Labour’s pride, when ...”

“... sections have something of the quality of a diary or a day-book: he takes note of public events (Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden and, somewhere in the background, the ...”

“... Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s ...”