“... this little book are mostly and merely stupid, or mostly and merely boring. But a gruesome little light is switched on behind the glaucous eyes when O’Brien comes to his closing stave, which is a veiled tribute to Nietzsche. Quoting himself from an earlier incarnation, he writes in a synthesis of the worst of Camus and the worst of Sartre: The advanced ...”

“... which can do quite a bit to illuminate the culture in which they were formed. The cold, harsh light which is supposed to be exposing all sorts of unsavoury things about Laura Riding’s person can thus be turned outwards, to expose these very myths of sexual voraciousness, self-preservation, aggression, ambition and intelligence, not in general, but in ...”

“... to recovering these censored passages and producing the standard edition for OUP. Infra-red light has penetrated most of the ink obliterations; over a thousand paste-overs have been floated away; the journals and letters have been transcribed. Hemlow herself supervised the 12 volumes of the later journals and letters (1791-1840) which appeared between ...”

“... citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No Londoner, according to the spin-doctors, is ever going to vote for a beard. The candidate, a Father Christmas in civvies, knows that better than anyone, knows he’s on a loser, but it ...”

“... Plan’ to guarantee ‘the common security of the whole world’. Well after the 1980s, when Alan Milward dismantled the myth that the Marshall Plan had injected capital into a continent that lacked it, rather than unlocking capital already there and speeding up a recovery already underway, liberal historians – mostly American – continued to extol ...”

“... by the prospect of ‘streets paved with Goldwyn’. Newly married again, to the writer and actor Alan Campbell, she moved to Hollywood in 1934 and worked there, on and off, for almost thirty years. While she endlessly complained about the way writers were treated on the ‘Isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before’, she took her work seriously. ‘No matter what the ...”

“... had gone missing around 10 p.m. on 7 October. All night, neighbours’ torches formed pinpricks of light along the south bank of the River Wear. Her body was found the next morning in the derelict Old Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s ...”

“... here, and a dank basement was converted into an opium den for Johnny Depp in the film version of Alan Moore’s From Hell. The war memorial remains off-limits while the conversion takes place that will magic the former servants’ quarters into luxury apartments for the Manhattan Loft Corporation and the rest into a flagship Marriott hotel. St Pancras is not ...”

“... and wells,/And watch the restless grasses lapping it.’ In other poems, he inhabits the foggy light of San Francisco: ‘The month is cool, as if on guard,/High fog holds back the sky for days’, or observes the city’s mean streets ‘where worldly Market Street/meets the slum of Sixth’. Or wallows in the city’s casual pleasures: ‘We greet/Two ...”

“... than the Book of Revelation. Orwell had Eton and the military police to draw on for 1984, and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) had Orwell. What’s interesting is that for this ‘entirely new departure’ James stayed so close to the sense that runs through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together ...”

“... that some form of multiracial executive must be created in Kenya, but the Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd was still adamant that ‘it will not be possible for many years to come to allow African members to be elected by universal adult suffrage.’ Some sort of ‘qualified democracy’ was required, the Government declared, to prevent ‘backward ...”

“... rejoiced in the mid-Thirties over the improvements brought to her home parish by artificial light, telephones, motor-cars, better health services and regulated hours of work. Hers is the kind of testimony which Arthur Mar wick likes to read. His new survey of Britain in Our Century deals with ‘Images and Controversies’. The Thirties supply one of ...”

“... and therefore of the world, must be seen to have weight. Even if a writer has been hired for his light touch, he will find the editor collaborating with him lest due gravity be compromised. The heavy contributor will be encouraged to grow heavier still, by putting down footnotes as a baobab tree puts down roots. At its most extreme the effect is of a learned ...”

“... Mellor was moved sideways and replaced by William Waldegrave, who offers a merciful moment of light relief in this bleak story. When Arafat was staying in London, Waldegrave called on him. Picking up an embroidered cushion, he said how handsome it was, and looked forward ‘to the day when I can walk down a Palestinian street and buy Palestinian goods as ...”

“... The Power and the Glory, but largely consist of forgotten country-house comedies, French classics, light farces, anodyne musical comedies and the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan (though, unlike today, there were no musical revivals, popstar tributes or shows based on films). In an era when the point of plays was to provide vehicles for star actors to ...”