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“... first pages. ‘The morning moves along.’ When he is in touch with the road (more often a rural lane or mountainous path), he feels safe. ‘A road generally knows what it’s about. You just have to follow it.’ ‘An open road calms everybody’s nerves.’ He likes to philosophise. ‘There aren’t a hundred different ways of passing our time here on ...”

“... Irish company, and she’d caught the eye of Thomas Coutts after she’d graduated to Drury Lane and was performing for Sheridan on £12 a week. They married after the death of his first wife (the mother of his daughters) in 1815, when she was 37 and he was 79. She was trounced as a predator and lampooned as a parvenue. Disraeli portrayed her as the ...”

“... in the form of a badger or white rabbit, invaded his rectory. The Age of Reason had the Cock Lane Ghost, a celebrated hoax, found to have been the work of a teenage girl. Around this time, ancient terrors begin to be reborn as mass entertainment – Defoe wrote a popular veridical tale, The Apparition of Mrs Veal, about a Mrs Bargrave in Canterbury who ...”

“... across all sorts of subjects: verse techniques, the difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur ...”

“... of the nativist gang (adorned and equipped, like their adversaries, in Braveheart meets Mad Max style), the Rabbits are outlawed and Priest’s young son, Amsterdam Vallon (soon to be Leonardo DiCaprio), is bundled off to a reformatory. In 1862, during the Civil War, the grown-up Vallon returns to the unchanged frontier town of Five Points, still run ...”

“... of a Spanish entrepreneur who played an important political role after Franco’s death, Max Mazin, about whom he had written a book, but the journey had been cancelled at the last minute. Oral biography is more familiar in the US than it is in Britain: George Plimpton and Studs Terkel were two of its best-known exponents. In these books, the life ...”

“... a clear radio channel to accommodate his iPod. To my alarm, in the dark of night on a narrow two-lane road, in the middle of truly-fucking-nowhere, the Maestro pulls over to the shoulder and puts his head in his hands. This is not good. He maintains that posture for some time. But then he rallies. He takes a deep breath and attacks the radio in earnest until ...”

“... and fluffy slippers.    ‘You will have to imagine the music. We are in a big theatre, Drury Lane ... Do you hear the fiddles?’    ‘No.’    ‘Use your imagination. Hark at the cymbals! And the tinkling bells. And here come the drums! You must applaud, boy. Clap your hands! I am a Persian Princess ... dancing in the Harem to please my ...”

“... in 1968 by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell) by a single enticing paragraph from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a ...”

“... have had to be content with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee beneath the bough in a by-lane. As one grew older, as one established oneself, one gained a new delight in formality. Her dress for the garden party, chosen to combine suitably with full academicals, lay, neatly folded, inside her suitcase. It was long and severe, of plain black ...”

“... was a man trained in every elite sanctum of the American meritocracy reduced to executing a Mad Max-style campaign of deliberate sabotage against the most basic operations of government. Cruz’s megalomania is so unhinged that he has alienated most of the Senate Republicans, meaning that he will never be able to get anything substantive done for his ...”

“... was very taken by an episode in the same novel in which Birkin and Ursula, standing in a country lane, in the middle of a passionate ding-dong about the authenticity of being, are briefly interrupted by a cyclist out for a ride. He gives them a nod (‘“Afternoon,” he said, cheerfully’) and disappears into the distance, back into whatever life it was ...”

“... the relentless observation and quantification of British academics.Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Wendy Brown gave at Yale in 2019. As she acknowledges, Weber is, on the face of it, a surprising choice of ally for a radical political thinker who has done so much to ...”

“... Complaint I’m not surprised at Dad’s reaction when he found it in my bookcase at Wood Lane fifty years ago. In some misguided missionary zeal that makes me cringe even to remember I may actually have recommended it. Because if it shocked him then it shocks me now, though I don’t imagine he read more than a few pages before putting it back and ...”