“... you feel you need a reminder of the timeframe. Now we move back to 1970, when Milk picks up Scott Smith (James Franco – last seen, by me at least, in the Spider-Man movies) in the New York subway, finds himself in a lasting relationship, comes out of the closet and moves to California, shedding his suit for denims and growing a beard and ponytail. He looks ...”

“... about Bacon’s claim that his parents had ‘sold’ him to an older man, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin. But he did visit Berlin with Harcourt-Smith in the spring of 1927. He was excited by the city itself but not by German art: ‘It always had too much of a story to tell,’ he said. In Paris and ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style took on added significance when ...”

“... begins with a comparison of the careers of William Godwin, the philosopher and novelist, and John Thelwall, the leading orator of the popular reform movement and author of The Peripatetic, one of the very best, most unread and most unclassifiable works of the 18th century: part novel, part travel journal, part satire, part commentary on the state of the ...”

“... I sometimes published from that immediate motive’. When the bills run up by his spendthrift son John forced him into accepting from a perfectly respectable journal a remunerative offer for some new verse, he wrote of going against all his ‘natural feelings’. His daughter Dora, close to her father’s literary values, called the deal ‘galling’ and ...”

“... against the shadow-plots derived from earlier fiction: as practised readers, we recognise Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway as the centres of intensity in the book’s life, the ‘major characters’, and are led to expect connection between them at the level of event. Instead, their contacts are oblique and communal: like other inhabitants of the ...”

“... died a week after birth. The sight of Mrs Grote in a turban is supposed to have provoked Sydney Smith to the comment that at last he understood the meaning of the word ‘grotesque’, but she seems to have been an admirable person, and the memoir of her husband that she compiled as a dutiful widow is the best source for his life. He did not have to worry ...”

“... or happy. Steedman is concerned to find this thinking at the level of daily life. She shows us John Locke writing to his Somerset friends, the Clarkes, asking advice about servants and ‘weighing up the capacities, abilities and personalities’ of the Clarkes’ maids. In contrast to his thoughts on the toilet training, washing and dressing of ...”

“... Kerouac, ‘On the Road’ (original typescript, 1951) Jack Kerouac, ‘The Slouch Hat’ (c.1960) John Cohen, ‘Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso’ (1959) Wallace Berman, Untitled (Allen Ginsberg, c.1960)PreviousNext These names belong to the original small group of friends who met in New York in the early 1940s. Within ten years Ginsberg had moved ...”

“... For Mendoza​, the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind ...”

“... George was a travelling salesman selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres & Smith turned their production over to military headgear. He persisted nevertheless, setting off day after day, decade ...”

“... Sensibility and sympathy were the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the ...”

“... will take its place alongside Gladstone’s diaries, the letters of Carlyle and Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill’s collected works as an indispensable resource for understanding the Victorians. With the possible exception of Adam Smith, there can be few economic gurus who have been so vulnerable to sustained political ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... the campaign, as a series of media events contrived to produce a predetermined image. Even when John Major defiantly got out his own soap box, it was an artifact, a television prop, a designer soap box. It was a surrender to show business, a triumph of trivia, a debasement of debate. Never in the history of electoral conflict had so little been said by so ...”