“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... up the cost of everything, and diverts money from honest citizens, including the recipients of winter fuel payments, who go cold and hungry as a result. No doubt there are more extreme, exotic or intellectualised forms of ethno-nationalism on social media, built on grander conspiracy theories, but Reform doesn’t need them. A folk wisdom that gestures ...”

“... pushing energy prices so high that they would spark what one Treasury official called a ‘nuclear winter recession’. Despite opposition from the White House, two senators – Mark Kirk, a Republican, and Robert Menendez, a Democrat (currently serving a federal prison sentence on corruption charges) – demanded sanctions ...”

“... There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the ...”

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

“... and then stopped again. Here, outside the city, there was still some snow on the ground’? (It is winter not Walter that has returned to the city.) It is the beauty of Musil’s German, at once sensuous and intellectually intense, that gives weight to this novel about weightlessness. It’s in the words, in the extraordinary metaphoric richness of the ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

“... portrait for Literary Britain could manage no more than an unconvinced section of cottage wall. Winter roses, not notably sick, masked the heritage tag. Ackroyd’s yellow sands were not in evidence. A holiday camp to the right and a diminishing display of groynes to the left. A brown and curdling sea, backed by a line of deserted beach huts. I left the ...”

“... He writes about nights of singing and dancing in Donegal as described by the American writer Robert Bernen, who went to live there in the 1970s. ‘I am also moved by the image of those Donegal nights,’ Joyce writes, ‘because what I see is a life lived after dark, so that the senses and their place in remembering come into view again, literally so ...”

“... made them oddities in the Tory camp, émigrés from Britain like Alan Walters, Ian MacGregor and Robert Conquest. Her Jewish Cabinet members were by definition marginal men within the Tory Party – which had the useful extra twist that they would be properly grateful for their preferment and in all likelihood would never become rivals for the ...”

“... Rebellion of 1641 between them dominate the proximate causation of the English Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine ...”

“... envelopes, manned phone banks, moved to grey Detroit when that was what it took to get the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings off the ground, in which a procession of veterans described the atrocities they had seen or committed. ‘I was a little surprised by her manner – no dramatics, no hip slang, no affectation,’ a journalist is quoted as saying. ‘She ...”

“... bright as so much state may be, as delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear no trace of winter as hothouse flowers can make it; soft and hushed, so that the ticking of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires alone disturb the stillness in the rooms; it seems to wrap those chilled bones of Sir Leicester’s in rainbow-coloured wool. And Sir ...”

“... were never more needed in your life and probably never will be more needed than you are just this winter by the Fawn,’ Norcross wrote to her in September 1910. She would live with her mother for a further 37 years, playing ‘the role’, as Leavell puts it, ‘of indulgent Uncle to her adorable Bunny’.‘The Paper Nautilus’, Marianne’s most nearly ...”

“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”