“... from Jane Eyre to the Asiatic Mode of Production challenges the staider compositional notions of white male scholars, it also has more than a smack of good old American eclecticism about it. In this gaudy, all-licensed supermarket of the mind, any idea can apparently be permutated with any other. What some might call dialectical thinking is for others a ...”

“... third of his collaborations with Herrmann. It is a very atypical Hitchcock, a return to black and white for the first time in a few years and shot in a low-key documentary style. It tells the true story (or true-ish: there is a tacked-on happy ending) of a jazz musician, played by Henry Fonda, who is wrongly accused of armed robbery and put through a ...”

“... John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the genre, because the chief frisson of true ...”

“... of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of ...”

“... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...”

“... and its personnel were far brighter than SIS’s ‘failed cavalry officers recruited in White’s or Boodle’s’. It was also less socially exclusive than the other secret services, giving it a wider pool of potential talent to trawl, though that was also thought to pose dangers: could the other classes’ loyalties be trusted? Despite these ...”

“... topographical sweep make the poem seem almost like a fragmented and extremely compacted Patrick White novel; and it is not always easy to follow. It is technically inventive, a quasi-cinematic exercise in sudden cross-cutting and the talented mimicry of a wide range of Australian voices and accents: but I find the rise and swell of Murray’s free verse in ...”

“... jogging, praising, claiming – even if he only has someone saying: ‘I am drinking a dry white wine’ – is finally cringing, odious and unbelievable. ‘My life, on the other hand, has been a series of border violations’; ‘Women are drawn to his heat; dogs rub against his legs’; ‘In her company, his manhood still soars, like Gothic ...”

“... law, the reversal of government policy on the privatisation of Heavy Goods Vehicle testing and the White Fish Authority levy. The Foreign Affairs Committee report on the repatriation of the Canadian constitution is widely reckoned to have influenced the smooth passage of the ensuing legislation. But such instances are exceptions rather than the norm and have ...”

“... there, or discussed his feelings. Orton concludes: ‘the sleeve of my rainmac is covered with white-wash from the wall. It won’t come off.’ All emotion, all sensation, is edited out. But the scene is there – horribly vivid, carefully written. Because Orton’s prose is naturally flat and economical, the pose is perfunctory. Was Orton ...”

“... laid on a grand night-time tour that climaxed in a visit to the Colosseum, which – according to Christopher Woodward in his excellent In Ruins – ‘was lit from inside by red lamps so that, as if ablaze, it cast a bloody glow on to the grass and the ruddy brick ruins on the surrounding slopes.’* Descanting to Albert Speer, his pet pseudo-classical ...”

“... do much without Ray’s driving energy.’ She even found time, despite the birth of her son, Christopher, and periods of near constant bleeding and pain from uterine fibroids, to campaign for the removal of the iron grille from the Ladies’ Gallery of the Commons, allowing women a clear view when, on 6 February 1918, the Representation of the People Act ...”

“... in the character of the pig-woman Ursula – in the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), ‘belly, womb, gaping mouth, udder . . . the celebrant of the open orifice’. It is a commonplace among critics that, since ‘Bartholomew Fair’ is almost the same thing or place as the theatre ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”

“... a simple rule that determines their sequence in a given line by assessing the colour – black or white – of neighbouring cells in the previous line. The pattern is left to evolve through iteration of the rule. An astronomically large set of such rules can be defined, and Wolfram charted the behaviour of as many of them as he could. Despite their extreme ...”