“... already fading hopes of an egalitarian and communitarian alternative to capitalism once the Berlin Wall came down, he might more aptly have labelled him a non-violent intellectual descendant of Babeuf, executed in Paris in 1797 as leader of the Conspiracy of Equals, who believed that when anyone is starving it is a crime to have more than enough. An ...”

“... set for European unity. An early version of the EEC was dubbed the ‘Union Charlemagne’ by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1950 speech accepting the inaugural Charlemagne prize, awarded by the city of Aachen every subsequent year to those who have advanced the cause of European unity. Receiving the award in 2018, Emmanuel Macron employed a ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... offending. ‘Rat Boy’ was small enough to hide in the ventilation shafts of Newcastle’s Byker Wall estate; ‘Spider Boy’ once escaped custody by squeezing between the bars of the dock. Night after night, Sunderland’s sprawling postwar housing schemes echoed to the screech of tyres and the blare of sirens as joyriders performed handbrake turns and ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... a disappointment, just huge hunks of stone which could be gateposts from the end of any dry-stone wall, and I imagine that is where other similar tombstones have ended up. Much more interesting is the lychgate (restored c.1989): a single broad gate, attached by a bar and chain to an ancient pulley in the thickness of the ...”

“... lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis à vis? – on a table – and under it?’ Byron was onto something. He was intuiting that his most important character – the one chiefly responsible for his pan-European fame, a celebrity probably unrivalled by that of any ...”

“... morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall to wall with off-piste names, admits (in conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to ...”

“... An egg-shaped space, one half-shell a bank of raked seating, the other a high wall of splintered striated rock, roofed by the sky and stars that Van Gogh saw haloed from Arles. You look down into a bowl of sand dented by a strip of water and a shallow pool. On a boulder behind you a robed musician raises a twisted horn and sounds an earthy fanfare, like an elephant cry ...”

“... penetrate my bones, as it penetrated the bones of the dead Romans.’ Corbridge is on Hadrian’s Wall. The Romans in Britain recur within her newly translated book of essays, Sous Bénéfice d’Inventaire, which has been given the title The Dark Brain of Piranesi. She first began to study Piranesi when she saw his 18th-century drawings of the Villa ...”

“... government’ have nowhere failed as abjectly as in the case of the ‘war on drugs’, by Richard Nixon out of Nancy Reagan. Many more consistent libertarian anti-statists, such as William Buckley, have publicly called for decriminalisation – a cumbersome term for a simple concept. It is when he writes as a techno-libertarian that Gingrich shows his ...”

“... paintings (begun in 1967 and 1972 respectively). The result of accidental sightings (a patch of wall spotted in Harlem, a pattern on a car glimpsed on a highway), these engaging series involve found images but also foreground traditional devices not often noticed. The flagstone shapes, in red, black and white, are glossy in a way that lifts them slightly ...”

“... such a strategy might work? The answer was proudly displayed in a framed text that hung on the wall of their front office. I have never made the pilgrimage to see it and remain content to imagine it as reverently executed in poker-work, like an old-fashioned scriptural motto. Certainly it provided the inspiration for the efforts of all the artillery ...”

“... loved, likewise Trainspotting. Almost anything scatological had great appeal. He also enjoyed the Richard Yates books I shared with him. When I was ill at one point I read through all of Derek Raymond, whom I recommend to anyone with a stubborn bacterial infection. ‘Oh, yes,’ Thom said, ‘he’s wonderful, isn’t he.’ Sometimes we came on an author ...”