“... Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his parents: Henry had resigned on a complex matter of principle. They settled at Tring in Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster ...”

“... pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat ...”

“... to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... comments to question the representativeness of her experience. They’d been taught the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status ...”

“... wing in Place’s day did have some virtually and actually criminal members (such as ‘Jew’ King and Patrick Duffin), and some exceptionally dissolute ones (such as ‘Dr’ Watson, Thomas Preston and Thistlewood). Place probably knew that Spence’s social vision included working-class ‘feasts of hospitality and love’ complete with ‘cheering ...”

“... might have taken his ten-year-old son to Coventry to see the entertainments laid on for Queen Elizabeth is firmly quashed (there’s no evidence for any such excursion and Tudor family life wasn’t like that), and, as if as an emblem of the fate of all such sweetly decorative fancies, even Schoenbaum’s account of the pretty bedroom walls at the Oxford ...”

“... such working-class heroes as Frank Little and Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that ...”

“... right, was taken in to see him in his coffin. The steadying influence was their Yorkshire nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, tenderly described in Charlotte’s article ‘An Old Servant’: ‘as fixed a part of the Universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high ...”

“... Tennenhouse (PS) shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ...”

“... and her sister’s husband, Stanley, even as she was repelled by his coarse bellow – ‘I am the king around here!’ In A Streetcar Named Desire everything worked; there were no loose ends, no characters without motivation, nothing impossible to accept or believe, nothing that needed to be fixed. It was the play that set Williams apart for life. Few lines ...”

“... Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The ...”

“... complaining that ‘news management’ had become ‘news invention’. Even the young Queen Elizabeth was moved to remark to her press secretary: ‘I think the basic dishonesty of the whole thing was a trouble.’ Now, 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the story up to ...”

“... and his songs are glittering with cribs from everything he ever loved, from A Taste of Honey, from Elizabeth Smart, from Karel Reisz’s films, everything, including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new bands ...”

“... sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its ...”

“... is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense ...”