“... high art and low. The 1998 Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos, for instance (published in Britain as The Lost Manuscript), is a thriller about diamond smugglers and carnival artistes that is narrated by a filmmaker obsessed with Isaac Babel. The stories’ subtlety with their sources allows them, unlike the novels, to be read as pure noir ...”

“... comes ill from a man who sneered ruthlessly at his own country while giving aid and comfort to Ian Smith’s gang of traitors and mutineers. The vulgarity of the politics also compromises, I find, the impression of the gentleman. When Worsthorne writes of being taken up by Irving Kristol at Encounter in the mid-Fifties, his self-deprecation deserts him as ...”

“... different perspectives, these four novels explore the underlying unease of life as it is lived in Britain in the Eighties.’ ‘Underlying unease’ is putting it mildly: at a first reading, I found these novelists (born 1958, 1958, 1959, 1961) almost unrelievedly depressing, stuck in bleak unmediated attitudes of despair. Later, I came to make ...”

“... given in an updated edition of Voluntary Euthanasia, issued to commemorate the Golden Jubilee in Britain of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. There Pieter Admiraal writes:   In our hospital at Delft every patient knows that he can always freely discuss with us the option of euthanasia if he wants to. If he opts for it, the decision of the team to perform ...”

“... Bill Deedes is justly celebrated as a nice man and an English archetype, the sort of character Ian Carmichael used to play in Ealing comedies: Woosterish, emollient, never standing on his rank, always accepting Tory family values – usually expressed more forcefully by a fearsome, chauffeur-driven auntie figure, as played by Margaret Rutherford, or, in Deedes’s own life, by Margaret Thatcher ...”

“... was demoralised and took only five further wickets in the series. It is not generally realised in Britain that this undoubtedly very great partnership was achieved against a crippled attack, and was certainly assisted when the batsmen found that the umpires would never give them lbw if they padded away straight balls by playing well forward. Sobers does not ...”

“... times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.’ The truth is, of course, that The Wealth of Nations is not a very violent attack on the commercial system but a collection of 17th-century truisms, and anyway the country was usually at war: free trade is not often maintained in wartime. But the ...”

“... and science’s rationalist proponents. Nor, of course, are they really ‘wars’. As Ian Hacking has pointed out, to call them that is to trivialise the horrors of real war. The ‘science wars’ attracted that name because in many ways they are a specialised version of the wider, but equally misnamed ‘culture wars’ of academia (particularly ...”

“... leave her husband and move to Tokyo, where she was based for the next two years. She returned to Britain in 1971, settling at first in Bath and then from 1976 in Clapham, where she lived with Pearce and raised her son and became ill with the lung cancer that would kill her in February 1992. Her early books ploughed a lonely, unconscionably peculiar furrow ...”

“... Between​ its towns and cities, the rumpled skin of lowland Britain is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes ...”

“... to see their utopias in homelands, for the national tendency ever (foreseeably) to die down. In Britain Thatcher tries to curry favour with voters by Little Englander sniping at European union – which nevertheless moves nearer and nearer in basic economic arrangements. In other countries nationalism is more likely to erupt in terrible extremes of ...”

“... In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium’s tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces ...”

“... of memorabilia she finds the ultimate Alma Cogan collectors’ item: a recording of Hindley and Ian Brady torturing their fourth victim, Lesley Ann Downey, while Cogan’s Christmas novelty hit ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ plays on Radio Luxembourg in the background. Being famous doesn’t just mean ‘enduring the bizarre projections of others’, Cogan ...”

“... about its audiences, buildings, distributors and publicists as it is about the films themselves. Ian Christie notes in The Last Machine (1994) that until around 1907 people didn’t visit the cinema with the idea of seeing a particular film. Audiences were captivated by the novelty of moving pictures: a baby having breakfast, a train arriving at a station, a ...”

“... of Literacy, though thanks to the tribulations of libel law it wasn’t published until 1957; that Ian Watt was giving final form to the book that became The Rise of the Novel, again published in 1957; and that Raymond Williams was drafting the bulk of what became Culture and Society, submitted to the publisher in 1956, eventually published in 1958. These were ...”