“... others have done, Kermode turned to apocalyptic in the attempt to counter-balance the overbearing weight of history. But in Eliot’s case, identification with tradition had itself been an attempt to escape from the apocalypse of The Waste Land. As Kermode noted in an essay written at the same time as The Sense of an Ending, the ‘imperialistic Eliot’ is ...”

“... By dint of following the Leninist model, small groups were able to punch far above their weight, while in the right historical circumstances, their structure afforded them enormous potential for expansion and, indeed, state-building. Even in unfavourable conditions, such as those that prevailed in Britain, their impact was out of proportion to their ...”

“... shut down. Prisoners suspended by the wrists have their feet touching the ground so that the weight is shared between feet and wrists, but this serves only to increase the time prisoners may be suspended, extends the pain and delays the infliction of permanent injury. That matters in what is known as stealth torture. It was in Mandate Palestine that ...”

“... itself/I have been speaking, for my theme has been/What passed within me.’ Rarely can such weight have fallen on those formerly unostentatious words ‘within’ and ‘me’. It’s not so far from that to the stylishly belligerent thing that Picasso is said to have said: ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’ The thought that the ...”

“... without guidelines in a statute. On one side there is the Crown or the United States, with all the weight of a government. On the other is a private individual or institution – a newspaper, say. Judges are trained to pay equal regard to parties, whatever their status, and I greatly respect their ability to do so. But when a newspaper asserts what it claims ...”

“... Lord Chancellor, Sir Claud Schuster, asserted in a private memorandum that in recent years ‘the weight of prejudice against the State in the minds of many members of the Court of Appeal and Judges of the High Court has been such as seriously to affect the Administration of Justice,’ neither fundamentally challenged the pattern of executive supremacism and ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... Individually, the players have little leverage, but as a group they have the power of the dead weight, of a scarcely perceptible inertia – the withholding of that last degree of rigour and vivacity that they know he wants from them.The relationship of conductor to players became structurally vitiated once he stepped out from the ranks of the ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...”