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“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children ...”

“... all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act. Here is Richard Gere interviewed – although that is not quite the right word – by Cameron Docherty in the Independent last June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious ...”

“... on populations, such a stance is time-consuming but indispensable. The South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the tribunal’s second appointed prosecutor, who saved it from an early demise and made it a court to be reckoned with, remarks in his foreword to Archbold: ‘There were no precedents on which we could rely. We came from many legal ...”

“... ones that I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it, which I always found phony’ – ‘third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things’. The emphasis now is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, none of the courtesies of ‘projection’, no more ...”

“... Arrian, curiously cut short. And what has happened to the famous description of Tyre? It would be nice to know, at any rate, what was so distasteful about the inscription that Alexander wrote on the ship he dedicated to Heracles after the conquest, ‘either his own composition or someone else’s, but not worth recording. That is the reason I myself didn’t ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... the subject up. ‘How’s the leg, Sacks?’ he asked, tapping the cast. ‘You’ve done a nice job,’ I replied, ‘but it doesn’t seem quite right.’ ‘Why, what’s the matter? Is it painful?’ ‘Well, not exactly. I am afraid it sounds silly, but ... but it seems to have no tone, and I can’t really feel it or move it.’ I saw an ...”

“... male previous tenant, a distinguished-looking chap, inspected the bottle and said it was a very nice wine but – with a propitiatory laugh – he preferred Burgundy. I said that for my part I didn’t much care for the way he was dressed. He smiled awkwardly and blushed. A certain coolness then ensued, to tell the truth, and conversation flagged. The not ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... Opera became a sensitive field of ideological possibilities: the traditions associated with Richard Wagner, in particular, had to be reassessed in the withering light of Nazism, while in Italy the revival – begun under Mussolini as part of a nationalist cultural policy – of an apparently dead repertory of early 19th-century works led to a vogue for ...”

“... campy romps such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, political dramas (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon), and TV travelogues (Vidal in Venice). With the exception of John Updike, no American novelist of the postwar period has shown as much disinterested devotion to criticism as a regular practice (as opposed to an easy way to keep your name in print ...”

“... to work three days a week so long as I didn’t try to do anything else, the usual line was how nice it’d be to work only on alternate days. Describing the symptoms again and again gets very boring. But no matter how hard I tried to explain that I couldn’t read, or that I was in far too much pain to get outside at all or, later, that most of the time I ...”

“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... to see wage rises as being in any way dependent on increased productivity; there is (nice one) the evident pride that specialist car-makers took in making their customers wait years for delivery. An attempt is made to resolve the apparent contradiction in the next chapter, on ‘The Learning Process’. Here the argument is that businessmen and ...”