“... has retained its allure, and its uses. Her work is full of people called things like Bill and Jim. Martin Amis, the subject of Barker’s undergraduate thesis, once wrote that the ‘way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world’. He wondered how people like Tom Metfield and Jane Framsby (from the novels of John ...”

“... enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white ...”

“... edition Hockney came across must be John Mavrogordato’s, published by the Hogarth Press in 1951 (Rex Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy ...”

“... The Tate was dominated by ‘bishops’ and Ede could get nothing past them. He did manage to get Rex Whistler a commission for a mural in the gallery dining room and would no doubt be exasperated but unsurprised to know that the bishop’s latter-day descendants have deemed it so offensive that the whole restaurant has been closed. In 1936, in the teeth of ...”

“... found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’. Martin Seymour-Smith, reviewing Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my ...”

“... have been, according to A. Alvarez, ‘a professional patrician’, but he was also, according to Martin Dodsworth, guilty of ‘artistic parasitism’. In his capacity as Poet Laureate, according to Julian Symons, even ‘the task of producing semiofficial occasional poems that were also of poetic interest defeated him.’ The Times obituary summed him up in ...”

“... a good character in a modern-day Ibsen play. At Cambridge as an undergraduate he was once in the Rex cinema when the adverts came on, including one for Kellogg’s Ricicles. ‘Rice is nice,’ went the jingle, ‘but ricicles are twicicles as nicicles.’ Whereupon Cedric boomed out: ‘But testicles is besticles.’By their jokes ye shall know them.The ...”

“... Paymasters held to ransom. ‘That was exactly the plan,’ Livingstone told his audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘It has gone absolutely perfectly.’ In boroughs affected by this 2012 game-show rabies – long-established businesses closed down, travellers expelled from edgeland settlements, allotment holders turned out – there were ...”

“... in Belfast, and when I recall him from 1974 I remember his interest in Cat Stevens and T Rex, in pacifism and lilac T-shirts. I asked to see him. Only if I signed a confession. No. The questioning went on. They told me my mother was waiting outside the barracks – had been waiting since the moment of our arrest. If I signed, she could collect my ...”