“... this came to an end in 1938, by decree not of the Germans but of their own government. After the war the V+W collaborative enterprise never made a real comeback, though their lyrics, set to superb jazz music by their own composer, Jaroslav Jezek, are alive in Prague to this day. Through Werich, Havel caught a glimpse of the ribald end of the intellectual ...”

“... believing that all spirits are either angels or devils, all drilled and in uniform and for ever at war and under direct orders either from God or Satan. If you believe in the Principle of Plenitude, or Great Chain of Being – that is, believe that God has caused life wherever there is room – it seems plain that there is room for life between ourselves and ...”

“... in 1935, is as blunt as Joan Crawford. (Her mother once told her that their family belonged to no class, but that’s a fine myth for an Eduene to shrug off on a Joan.) And Didion likes names as much as clothes. When young and in Paris, she looked up Didion in the telephone directory and found a lot. To which I’d add that ‘Maria Wyeth’ – she is the ...”

“... drama of Brexit. Milne dismissed those concerned with Brexit as engaged in an unserious ‘culture war’. But one does not always get to choose which war to fight.In the wake of Labour’s defeat a year ago, some fantasised – with the benefit of hindsight – about what might have been if Corbyn had handed over the reins ...”

“... legs – Corrosive, hairy, rank – and, shameless, begs For Pestilence to fuck her if he can, For War to come, and come again, again.In the evening I might turn to the overwrought adulterous rhapsodies of Marry Me (1971), in which a man strokes a woman’s arm and says, ‘No one’s ever told you how cunty you are,’ and regret that the sexual revolution ...”

“... of mind’ enables the extreme political complexity of primate society, with its rigid class system, dynasties, alliances and rebellions, and later, when the hominids and language came along, allowed skills and practices to be spread and passed down through generations.If this extraordinary stacking of world-models in modern humans is a true ...”

“... and nullity the opium, perhaps, of the English rectory and manor-house during the troubled inter-war period. With an extraordinary unanimity, good representative Introductions to Hamlet and critical essays on it speak of it as ‘the most enigmatic play in the canon’, ‘the most problematic play ever written by Shakespeare or any other playwright’: a ...”

“... corrupted by a political assault on locality, that humans unable or unwilling to engage in a war they can’t win respond by venturing into forbidden depths. As the first Thatcherite towers sprung up in Docklands, and downriver parts of London agreed to behave as if the fictions of J.G. Ballard were planning documents, the painter Gavin Jones, working ...”

“... venture on ‘Art’. Amis is listed by Hugh Kenner as an example of the post-(Second-World-) War trough in the English arts, a case of ‘anarchic energies ... there to draw applause’. Amis doesn’t always, of course, draw applause-there are English readers too who reckon him a philistine, and who neither like nor admire the books; and he clearly ...”

“... and then (after she cuts their meetings short) with a pretty, dark-haired young woman in his class called Melanie, whom he nicknames Meláni, ‘the dark one’. Lurie is described as having sex with Melanie some three or four times, during which she remains inert, barely co-operative. Shortly afterwards, she charges him with harassment. Hauled up before ...”

“... has produced it. In this respect, Howells lies open to extreme misunderstanding. The narrow middle-class ‘selfishness’ of merely familial affection is liable to be shrunk and chilled by the sweeping Tolstoyan perspective of full human possibility, one he needs to be felt as consciously holding back from. Likewise the Kentons’s provinciality may arouse ...”

“... with relish and approval is the one he heard Coleridge give in the winter of 1798 – an anti-war oration by a poet who would eventually choose not to join the Unitarians after all. Any final inference about Hazlitt and Dissent ought to be complex. His turn from the faith was not a defection, and one only stands back, a little, at Paulin’s decision to ...”

“... at the sheer unlikeliness of what he’s up to: Einstein bent the Universe     To make war obsolete. Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush     The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced     The new age with a tweet.The butcherbird is in fact native to Australia, but that doesn’t stop Hughes punning on its name in ...”

“... of honeybees, known as colony collapse disorder, is not global warming but a widely used class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids that mimic the effects of nicotine and act as nerve poisons. Honeybees pollinate about a third of the world’s crops, and their disappearance would eliminate foods such as cucumbers, berries, almonds and avocados from ...”

“... word. What about that? That’s what it means to die an honourable warrior, on your shield, your war-cry on your lips!’ It was Uncle Vasily who took the little Pushkin, in 1811, to his admission interview at the new lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles south of Petersburg, where the boy would make several enduring friendships, and where he wrote 29 ...”