“... preferred to smoke cigar-like rolls of tobacco, copying the Carib, Arawak and Tupi peoples of the West Indies and South America, James was dismayed by the readiness of Englishmen to adopt Algonquin customs of pipe-smoking and without ‘blushing, abase ourselves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians’. Why not also ‘imitate them in walking naked as ...”

“... posh herdsmen who have lost their reindeer. At Shoreditch Church, they dress to the left and march west under the railway bridge. It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the ...”

“... how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan’. The Nicolsons were hardly impoverished – they’d moved into Sissinghurst Castle a few years before ...”

“... flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily ...”

“... ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian ...”

“... decided to withdraw from Raqqa and other hard to defend, lightly populated areas in the north and west and focus instead on consolidating the government’s hold on Damascus and the heavily populated areas linking the capital to Latakia in the north-east. But as the army gained in strength with the Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey ...”

“... while still in her mid-twenties, after undertaking a madcap tour of Siberia when her career in the West began to fade. Her body is thought to be buried in Novocherkassk. The 1701 Stradivarius cello, kept in a lead-lined case, which accompanied her across snow, ice and flooded rivers, somehow made its way back to Paris, then was taken to Berlin, where it ...”

“... Labour towns, unsusceptible to the apocalyptic communism of the Rhondda Valley slightly further west. In his early years, before he became a Labour councillor, Bevan was attracted by the founding text of Welsh militant unionism, The Miners’ Next Step (a product of the Rhonnda, largely written in 1912 by the Marxist Noah Ablett). As a teenage ...”

“... that’s just cheer-leading, not truth-telling – for which Williams was supposedly renowned. Anthony Barnett, for example, writes that ‘Raymond Williams stands for a kind of truthfulness.’ To read Williams on the miners’ strike is to wonder about such a judgment. And it wasn’t just the miners’ strike. Listen to Williams on The Forward March of ...”

“... Wapping was a tragedy. Meanwhile the press which empowers him, the literate liberal press of the West, has become a thinly scattered archipelago from which, every so often, one more island disappears. Ascherson works from a highly privileged atoll. The relative freedom of its space has turned him from chronicler into essayist. Not in the old sense, when the ...”

“... that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family might be embarrassed by his confessions: they were ...”

“... eventually result in 2015’s The Little Red Chairs, which begins in the pinned locality of the west of Ireland but soon enlarges to include a Bosnian Serb war criminal and The Hague – though her descriptions of stone massages are still more immediate than her descriptions of the courtroom, and we wouldn’t want it otherwise.Her new novel, Girl, is ...”

“... structured around him that it was once called a ‘one-man stand-up tragedy routine’ (by Samuel West, a fine Hamlet for the RSC in 2001) might also have given Yorick a run for his money as an incisive jester. I can’t think of anything in English drama before Shakespeare comparable to this quip, and it certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever ...”

“... writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family – Burgess was driven to the expedient ...”

“... sophisticated poems versed in the Anglo-American tradition, dedicated to the likes of Mark Strand, Anthony Hecht and Susan Sontag, and aimed primarily at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no ...”