“... 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 ...”

“... decided on a political career when he watched the movie The American President, which stars Michael Douglas as a widowed president who falls in love with a lobbyist. Apparently, the film helped Edwards to imagine ‘a life of purpose following a great personal loss’. (Incidentally, it also means that two of the three main Democrat contenders for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of each other to avoid running below privately owned foundations, as at Chancery Lane and Notting Hill Gate. The consequence was the series of sharp curves and gradients which still jolt passengers today but in the early days of the Tube were more extreme, often hurling travellers against each other. Since the City & South London was, uniquely for the era, a ...”

“... ends. Her tale of scholarly intrigue and Cold War defamation finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at ...”

“... the waters, he wrote to William again a month later: ‘The place is unfortunately built up & down hill & whenever one goes out it is always (in some degree) a perpendicular trudge – which for a man with my trouble is a circumstance to be regretted.’ In this letter, James made clear what one of the problems really was, having hinted at it in an early ...”

“... a guise of compassion.Later the same year A Minority by ‘Gordon Westwood’ (the sociologist Michael Schofield) presented the results of interviews with 127 queer men, with statistical breakdowns of where and how often they found partners, and of patterns of friendship and courtship which turned out to be much like hetero ones. The result is pleasingly ...”

“... fund manager, and Dashiel Munding, a music producer. He stayed in Munding’s flat in Notting Hill. The friends ate out, watched a video of the Jim Carrey film Fun with Dick and Jane, in which a couple facing bankruptcy turn to crime, while Neil exaggerated his money problems, saying he’d bought, not leased, the BMW, and had taken out a 100 per cent ...”

“... close on the flat. And this uncertainty spreads. Writers on Infidelity have often been aware – Michael Podro most eloquently – that Veronese’s main way of conveying the uncertainty of ‘positions’ in the circuit of Love is by drawing the viewer into a game of unreadable orientations. The woman’s back, shoulders and arms are at the heart of ...”

“... railway age, in the opening of Bleak House, ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. Mere ‘foot passengers’ struggle through the rain to their places of employment, adding ‘new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud’. The timid prose of Crossrail copywriters perverts Dickens by remediating his visions through a health and safety ...”

“... population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann, writes, ‘the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three months, a much more rapid escalation than Hitler’s later attack on the Jews.’ Sakir – probably more than any other conspirator, the original designer of the ...”

“... afterword to Pygmalion, who’s left Professor Higgins’s establishment, married Freddy Eynsford-Hill and opened a flower shop. Maureen was already well prepared. She had begun working for a florist in South Kensington after I’d been away at school for four or five years and she’d gone on to run a stall in Rutland Mews East. It was a success. Colin ...”

“... food if we drop tariffs on agricultural imports from Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as Michael Gove wants to do, and it gets even better. Just not for farmers. The spectre haunting the British farmyard is that the EU debate will turn public attention to what’s happening down on the farm, whatever the referendum result. There is, after ...”