“... behind his throwing in the towel – among them his private income and his feeling that the war had put an end to the world he knew – it’s clear that the life he’d come to see as the antithesis of art’s ‘conventionalities’ was predominately gay life. Publishability was one problem; another was that Forster’s fiction seemed to need the ...”

“... that is recycling water from the morgue where the corpses of victims of Mexico’s drug war are washed (Air, 2003, by Teresa Margolles) gives a very different feeling from the white cube called The Air-Conditioning Show (1966-67) by Art & Language, an angry manifesto about the way ambience creates value. It sounds insane to fill the Hayward with ...”

“... to take such drastic action at all? Our debt ratio was much higher after the Second World War and neither Attlee nor Churchill felt any obligation to do what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have done. Even Darling’s proposed schedule of deficit reduction seems excessively prudent. A less political chancellor might simply have allowed economic recovery ...”

“... It did little to change the state apparatus or the economy, but kept itself busy by waging war on the media and debating whether to recognise the ‘knightly orders’ created during the authoritarian interwar regime of Miklós Horthy. It even made timid moves towards rehabilitating Horthy himself. But people weren’t interested in symbolic ...”

“... 17th century it was estimated that the commons could have bought the lords twice over: the Civil War and Britain’s experiment with republicanism were on their way. One of the principal contributors to this long and uneven process was, of all people, Henry VIII, who repeatedly resorted to Parliament for legislative authority for his divorces and his break ...”

“... history of art that often lapses into mechanical studies of ‘context’ with little concern for class and even less for art. As Nagel and Wood polemically put it: ‘“Art” is the name of the possibility of a conversation across time, a conversation more meaningful than the present’s merely forensic reconstruction of the past. A materialist approach to ...”

“... me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding ...”

“... us, for instance, that Gray was already 41 when he completed his first novel. From his working-class parents – especially his father – he inherited the political philosophy that runs through all his writing: his belief that ‘socialism can improve social life, that the work we like best is not done for money, and that books and art are ...”

“... the lawn with portents of disaster at Gatsby’s parties; no collective urge to write the great war novel; no second sex. To judge by the best of the new writing, the most urgent of the new films, the most-watched television, American lives are now devoted to a wholesale inhabitating of the dead afternoon. It is not the world of beginnings nor the world of ...”

“... on action, seriousness and good works. She was also – again like Thatcher – permitted a first-class education. Hobbled with thick, unmanageable blonde hair, thick ankles, and thick glasses for extreme shortsightedness (she did not bother with contact lenses until she was 33), Hillary threw herself into school work, into being a Brownie and Girl Scout, and ...”

“... not as a cheerfully rising graph – increasing prosperity in the South, and the gradual end of war in the North – but as what he calls ‘a series of interconnected crises’, and interconnected liberations. He traces a number of overlapping movements: some, like the Celtic Tiger, seemed to happen incredibly quickly; others, like the peace process in the ...”

“... fact-collecting investigation he excelled in. His letters began in 1673, when his nation was at war with England, and, until the Dutch in 1688 helped England’s Whigs overthrow their Stuart rulers, were punctuated with polite salutes to that dynasty’s patronage; but throughout, politics deferred to higher motivations. It was, Leeuwenhoek ...”

“... da Pisa – a composer of Arthurian romances – while the two were languishing as prisoners of war in Genoa. Polo had travelled as a youth, with his merchant father and uncle, to the realm of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (reg. 1260-94). While his elders transacted their business, the young Marco ingratiated himself with the Great Khan thanks to his ...”

“... and to her. ‘A small Vesuvius,’ she called him. They left Europe for New York to escape the war, then travelled back to Europe during the McCarthy hearings. (In a letter to a friend she calls herself ‘the wandering planet Chris’.) But Blake was already married with a daughter when they met. Stead spent 23 years waiting for his wife to grant him a ...”

“... we would call post-traumatic stress disorder: as a cavalry officer in Cuba during the Spanish war, he witnessed the slaughter of his herd in an artillery attack and never recovered from the shock. In lieu of old-fashioned reproduction, the Shakers expanded their ranks by recruiting lost souls, as well as ‘orphans and children born out of ...”