“... begging money from them obscenely, and urinating over their smart cars. My sleeve was taken by a man who dragged me into the hellish narrative of 22 years spent in jail. Shuddering with horror at the deteriorated company into which he had been released, this fellow declared his own outlaw ethic in words that for me will always ...”

“... was when I stayed to listen to the next lecture, ‘On Alleged Medical Negligence’, delivered by George Bonney, a laconic orthopaedic surgeon with long experience on the governing body of the Medical Defence Union. His tongue-in-cheek thesis was that the invention of penicillin had been a disaster for doctors, who until then had been unable to cure much ...”

“... has been manifest in a far more obvious form in both Europe and Japan. In theory, this should not be happening. After all, in the United States there was no significant Communist or neutralist party, and therefore no equivalent to the alliance/anti-alliance party alignments of Europe and Japan. Instead there was a ‘bipartisan’ consensus on the need to ...”

“... animal. Lawrence is a mystic literalist. He is always a poet and always a preacher. He should not be opened into two. In his book, Apocalypse, which was published posthumously in 1931, one of the pleasures he takes in the book of Ezekiel and the book of Revelation is the literalism of their half-pagan world of gods and flames and wheels and beasts. He is ...”

“... a family of cantors), who escaped his father’s home to become a child saloon singer. By the first decade of the 20th century, he had assimilated the oldest conventions of New World show business – the burnt-cork make-up that was the central characterisation of America’s first indigenous theatrical form, the ‘mother song’ that had given ...”

“... studies primers and coffee-table books. They provide both an intellectual commentary, written by academics, journalists and art-world figures, and a comprehensive set of colour reproductions of the works in a show, taken by specialised photographers. From a practical point of view they are freebies for the ...”

“... Seventies (which now appear positively antiquarian) as a radiant blank. Polar nothingness bordered by custard-yellow feeder roads steering over-ambitious voyagers back to the tunnel and the distant prospect of a return to civilisation. This pilgrim’s progress is a familiar one for card-carrying Cockneys, a way out, a trip into the unknown. Musician and ...”

“... terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight into the dictionaries of quotations and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck ...”

“... is one overarching formula, we are told, under which all intelligible locutions about freedom can be subsumed. The prevalence of this belief appears to be due in large part to the influence of a single classic article, Gerald MacCallum’s ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’ (1967). Whenever the freedom of an agent is in ...”

“... English and provincial event, the procession into which this ill-assorted group will shortly be organised also includes people dressed in simulated buckram and taffeta and the gleaming mock-silver of property breastplates and crowns, all of them borrowed from the second-best wardrobe of the Royal Shakespeare Company in order to deck out students and ...”

“... remote, even quaint, the Tres Grandes of the Mexican School – Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – are often treated as a single entity. Where distinctions are made, the didacticism of Rivera’s work tends, and I believe deserves, to be unfavourably compared to the expressionist passion of ...”

“... premature death in violent and mysterious circumstances in 1610, pictures influenced by his work were to be found in many different parts of Europe. There were paintings of card parties inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff ...”

“... The heroes of Albert Camus’s books can be quite annoying: surly, self-dramatising Hamlets who like to think of themselves as strong, silent loners, wise to human folly. But although they are often arrogant, self-absorbed and predictable, they are also susceptible to the weather, and happy to be upstaged by unseasonable storms, torpid nights, fierce sunlight, or the chance of a swim in the limpid sea ...”

“... with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters. Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The appearance of such a being, she thought, might move others to speak and act in ...”

“... to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I am on my way to the prison cell ...”