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“... outside the small Ukrainian town of Mostyska, squinting at a transliteration of the Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a couple of stubs of rock, the only remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials. Brown hens pecked at the ...”

“... and posters, fire engines and other Yes-mobiles.’ In the middle of the coalition government’s austerity programme, the ‘Yes’ campaign promised a country free from Tory policies and Tory prime ministers. The Conservatives lost all of their Scottish seats when Labour won at Westminster in 1997, regaining one in 2001. They still had only that single ...”

“... after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional ...”

“... Kate Moss done up as Ziggy Stardust. The picture is a monument to improbable staying power. It’s more than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at ...”

“... of the Prime Minister, a 65-year-old woman with a voice ‘pitched somewhere between a tenor’s and an alto’s’, old-fashioned ideas on the upbringing of children and a deep scorn for the railway network. The Britain she governs bears a plausible relation to the Britain we live in now. It is a soulless place. Notions of public welfare have succumbed to ...”

“... core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time. Such, at any rate, is the theme of David Reisman’s two volumes of intellectual biography and analysis – the most careful and thought-provoking exegesis yet to appear. Crosland was a man of contradictions, as Reisman shows, a hedonist who was also a ...”

“... For the first time I’m nervous flying to Belfast. It’s early morning, Friday 22 May, and radio reports tell of streams of voters heading to the polls. As I buy the Irish Times at the newstand in Terminal One, I catch sight of one of my graduate students – we nod and smile quickly. He’s flying to Cork to vote Yes ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... party, but I didn’t go because it was the hottest summer ever – at that point – and I was so enormous I could barely move. But I read her stuff, in the Guardian and the Independent, and I thought of her fondly, though with increasing distance. Until a couple of years ago, when I noticed her pieces filling up with distress.‘I have trouble ...”

“... written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct version; yet for all its ...”

“... The Christodora​ of Tim Murphy’s novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the area had become known as the East Village, and the building had come down in the world. After a fire it was refurbished and turned into a condominium, in which Steven Traum, an urban planner, bought an apartment, using it as office space while he continued to live on the Upper East Side ...”

“... New York, America, and the year is 1968 or 1969. We are having cocktails, the Southern gentleman’s expression for raw liquor sprayed with vermouth, at Elaine’s Restaurant, or perhaps it’s the home of Jean Stein, the wealthy and stunningly attractive daughter of the chairman of the ...”

“... and the first Industrial Revolution, via tennis, golf and, above all, association football. So it is not surprising that what are generally accepted as the major North American contributions to the high culture of our century are rooted in popular and – the US being what it is – commercial entertainment: films and the music shaped by jazz. There is ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... Howard Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, was published last year, and made one think that a new exponent of the comic academic narrative had arrived. Jacobson’s hero, Sefton Goldberg, Jewish and highly suspicious of his Gentile surroundings, is aggressive towards the literature he’s supposed to be teaching, to a degree that makes Leavis seem like a nice auntie ...”