“... a malignant chain reaction. By 14 July, transport was moving, the Number 30 bus trundled up the hill from King’s Cross as I walked down, once again, to the station. There were more pedestrians, certainly, more rucksacks, but bus passengers were as stoic, preoccupied, chemically adapted as ever. They looked forward, impatiently, to the forthcoming Harry ...”

“... younger authors, among them Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes), Philip Caputo (A Rumour of War) and Michael Mewshaw (Walking Slow), he is the encouraging old pro, spreading the largesse. He recognised and recommended Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), ‘an all-around swell cat’. The literary shoptalk in these letters is free of jargon and brimming with ...”

“... declare on the opening page of his book Strategic Camouflage (1920), ‘“The Other Side of the Hill” no longer exists.’ A photograph taken from 12,000 or 14,000 feet would reveal everything to the trained eye (‘even a track made by the passing of a few men over a field’). Under these circumstances, ‘art alone could screen men and intentions where ...”

“... greatest comedy and one of the greatest comedies in English’. More recently, Howard Erskine-Hill, pursuing a political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the ...”

“... in 2004), set in the 1980s, the protagonist, Nick, was invited to stay in a large house in Notting Hill by a Tory MP and his family. He stayed there for years. Nick’s last name, Guest, almost insists on this status of provisional privilege, the satisfaction and desolation of being included without belonging. Freddie Green, the first-person narrator in the ...”

“... alone for more than four decades. ‘He seduced the army with bonuses,’ according to Tacitus (in Michael Grant’s translation of the Annals), ‘and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians … War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed.’ Suetonius puts ...”

“... his head – ‘La, Sir! You’re always fancying things.’ One of the book’s recent champions, Michael Neve, finds it a ‘subtle meditation on the philosophical ludicrousness of love’, a ‘picture of driven desire that, with Freudian exactness, ends up without even an obscure object’. All the while Hazlitt continued his punishing schedule of literary ...”

“... relative importance.’ Compare with this a sociological example taken from a recent study by Michael Roberts of the rise of a Karava élite in Sri Lanka. It can plausibly be explained as due to their adoption of Catholicism, to their involvement in catamaran fishing (and hence their evolution into a class of capitalist boat-owners), to their retention of ...”

“... he said, recalling the dairy farm, and the stumps, ten feet high and 12 inches in diameter, on the hill ‘back of where the pasture was’. That forest had been logged in 1890. The focus of our conversation, as we remained between car and house, shifted from the memory ground of Oregon to the recent nuclear meltdown in Japan, and the practicalities of ...”

“... were now in favour with Rudolf, among them the Parma-born mountebank Giovanni Scotta and the Pole Michael Sendivogius, author of the influential Novum Lumen Chymicum. The documentary record of these years is mainly one of crippling debt. Still liable for the 15,000 thaler fine, Kelley is mostly to be found scrounging credit at high interest. On 15 December ...”

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my ...”

“... way to have stumbled on the secret entrance to the court of the Paphian goddess in the Hollow Hill where his own duties were diurnally enacted. At the Victory Service in St Paul’s soon afterwards, one of the pivots of A Dance, the narrator’s mixed feelings about a ceremony he finds in many ways more lowering than elevating – his thoughts wandering ...”

“... in many other countries in Europe, Aids was initially considered an overseas ‘media import like Hill Street Blues’, in Garfield’s words. The gay charity Switchboard assured nervous callers that ‘sex is as safe as crossing the road.’ When Terrence Higgins collapsed at work and began inexplicably dying in a London hospital in July 1982, his boyfriend ...”

“... politics in 2013, with the Kilburn Manifesto, put together with his old comrades Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin. ‘The Labour Party,’ he wrote with Alan O’Shea, ‘may be busy developing alternative policies, but there’s no sign that it is breaking with the neoliberal framing of debates … Rather, it is nervously responding to polls which frame their ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”