“... Abbey’ as a ‘post-revolutionary’ work. Roe argues the poem is haunted by the spirit of John Thelwall, the radical orator who was extremely popular in the 1790s and to whom Roe’s book is dedicated. In 1798 Thelwall was living a few miles away from Tintern Abbey, having retired from political engagement after the wave of arrests which followed the ...”

“... music (his characters have a particular taste for Mahler and for the Elizabethan composer John Dowland). In 1947 the awkward young man with literary ambitions moved into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record ...”

“... of his campaign to lift the oppression of an empire without reliance on cruelty or revenge, he took care to add that non-violent resistance was often itself a case of the lesser evil. Some of its acts of willing self-sacrifice called for the sacrifice of unasked persons elsewhere: ‘Gandhi’s boycott of British cotton results in the undernourishment of ...”

“... shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the ...”

“... This became all too clear during the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968. At the outset, Brezhnev took a fatherly liking to Alexander Dubček, the new party leader in Prague. ‘It is speculation,’ Schattenberg writes, ‘but he clearly saw in him a Czech [sic] version of himself: a young, pleasant man who was replacing an unpopular party leader ...”

“... throughout his life. Involving himself with the New Deal spirit of the Federal Theatre Project, he took the Negro People’s Theatre job for $50 a week and was sneered at by critics for his black Macbeth. When money was short, he personally subsidised his FTP Doctor Faustus: not the first time, nor by a long way the last, that he used his own money to keep a ...”

“... he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through it, one bit at a time, in a ...”

“... of branches across the country were targeted by protesters on the same day. In Tottenham, Ruby took the microphone. ‘My landlord …’ she said. ‘This is a man who took the Hippocratic oath, but who now rakes it in by stacking up vulnerable humans in a home riddled with damp. I am so angry. I want to know when we ...”

“... Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in laundry and mending work. She discovered that laundresses and seamstresses in America were no better paid than they had been in Painswick. The average seamstress in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called ...”

“... there are about 30,000, an average of two closing every day; the French home meal a generation ago took 88 minutes to prepare, now it’s 38 minutes; the great majority of French cheeses were unpasteurised in the 1950s, now only 10 per cent are made from raw milk; French family-owned wineries and farms have been going out of business at an alarming rate, and ...”

“... to admire, though not all the evidence points that way. Bisexual Fork. One day Dad’s rhetoric took a startling new tack. ‘You’re right, Adam,’ he said. ‘My generation was brought up with a very simple sense of these things. When I say I’m heterosexual, I only mean that all my past experience has been with women. There’s nothing to stop me from ...”

“... cartoon, but before he could finish what sounded uncannily like the solicitor’s speech in John Osborne’s play Inadmissible Evidence, a year or so later, Doris grabbed my sleeve and we escaped down the winding wooden staircase, with the sound of his voice echoing behind us. In addition, my mother had one of her screaming fits and threatened to sue ...”

“... certainly all the more presentable dykes in town were on hand.’On one occasion Barney took Capote to another part of Paris. ‘She wanted to show me something very unusual and extraordinary which very few people had ever seen.’ When they got to a ‘curious little neighbourhood place near the Arc de Triomphe’, Barney told her chauffeur to stop ...”

“... none.Look again at Paradise with the Bouts alongside it. One thing is clear. Whoever it was first took possession of Bosch’s picture – whether they signed a contract or bought it from a dealer – must have known perfectly well what they were paying for. Brilliant improvisation on an old theme. Free, subtle, suggestive variation. Maybe the fantasia ...”

“... jumped straight on a train to Nashville, there to meet with her friends-and-collaborators-to-be. John Crowe Ransom, then a key member of the Fugitive group, tells the story of what happened next. Undoubtedly we were rather absurd in the way we received Laura at Nashville – prim, formidable and stiff. What she came for was human companionship of the most ...”