“... the omission from Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation of most of the 20th century. Lewis cuts straight from Charlotte Yonge to a quick epilogue called ‘Post-Modern Mary’, which barely has time to do more than mention Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor (1996), Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped off (1992) and Princess ...”

“... like a performer being judged – radiant with nerves. As a diplomat, he is masterly. Faced with a straight question from a BBC interviewer, he speaks fluent fog. You want to coin, in the spirit of admiration, a new verb of speech, ‘to soothe’. As in, the Ambassador’s personal assistant soothed: Indeed, every generation of arts carries with it the ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... Paul, called her Doke. Childhood friends called her Dodo or Didi or Priscilla Preoccupied. Michael Curtiz called her Miss Lachrymose (she could weep on cue). Jack Carson called her Zelda. Fans called her Miss Huckleberry Finn. Film crews called her Nora Neat and Dorothy Detail. A staff assistant called her Janie O. Gene Kelly called her Brunhilda. Bob ...”

“... new kind of film industry in Nigeria. The results are known as ‘home movies’ – they are shot straight onto video and sold direct to the public. One of the new, independent television stations, MBI, was the first to air a home movie every evening. The slot was so popular that the Government-owned Nigerian Television Authority quickly followed suit.The ...”

“... have paid them homage: the history of music, art, poetry. Dada or Surrealism; the Sex Pistols or Michael Jackson; the Situationist International or – well, if nothing bears comparison with it, few would have any trouble establishing the scale on which to measure the importance of Guy Debord and his band of angels. The comparisons themselves are eloquent ...”

“... spots is true, and, if we have not remarked the fact as we read, it is for a reason taking us straight to the heart of Christie’s mystery. Her writing is so flat and cliché-ridden and undistinguished that we pay very little regard to it as we forge through the story; if those phrases of Ackroyd’s are oddly stiff it is just a matter of his creator’s ...”

“... south to Dorset, and is now, as a result, a land of ‘wide views, sweeping sameness, and straight lines’. The hedges of this Planned Countryside are made up mainly of hawthorn, very often exclusively so; elsewhere they are mainly mixed, tend to wander about a lot and are, on the whole, demonstrably much more venerable. A great many of our hedges ...”

“... book is not the success that its author’s credentials might have led one to expect. Straight political narrative without much of the promised analysis can become fairly dull, and the rather flat and occasionally unclear prose does not help. Some sections of the book bear the marks of haste. Dismantling the Carolingian political world enables her ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst offenders, Michael Gove and Liam Fox, are Scots sitting for English seats) – is in thrall to imperial nostalgia, has delusions of Great Power status, has never felt itself to be European, has a victim mentality, has a contemptuous attitude to Ireland as its former ...”

“... as its intellectual arbiters, and PEP remained on the fringe, even though its new secretary, Michael Young, put what he could into Labour’s 1945 ‘Let us face the future’. Afterwards, there was no alternative but to switch from being a ginger group to becoming a fully-fledged research institute, in which professional researchers, jealous of ...”

“... curé. With their godless language and habits, their heathen names (Bristol Joe, Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby), and their service of the false god Industry, they must be emissaries of that devil’s army the Saint-Simonians. In the final story, ‘Tunnel’, Barnes shows his hand more clearly about interpretation, implying definitely that hermeneutics ...”

“... world. Booth asked me if I had read ‘Sunday Morning’ by Wallace Stevens. I hadn’t, but went straight to my room and found it in a cheap anthology bought not long before in a thrift store. ‘There is not any haunt of prophecy,’ Stevens writes, ‘nor cloudy palm/Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured/As April’s green endures.’ Who needed ...”

“... imagined. As Morris put it in one of his theoretical writings, progress for socialists is not a straight line but a ‘spiral’.In News from Nowhere (1890), Morris wakes in his Hammersmith house to ramble through the decentralised, decarbonised, communist England that has emerged after the revolution of 1952. It is rich with the pleasures of such ‘what ...”