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“... haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the Medway from Rochester to Chatham, represents ‘a basic shift from retro to necro’. In Ramsgate ‘light bulbs swing unclothed.’ And the blue-plaqued yawn of Middle Street, Deal is ‘where escapism ends up’. Seabrook’s special ...”

“... of subject matter, and that the writing of prose fiction could be as scrupulously organised as Sir Philip Sidney’s double sestina’. Both The Conversions and Tlooth (1966) present the reader with a cornucopia of improbable inventions, bizarre artefacts, linguistic riddles and mind-boggling discoveries, all recounted in a studiedly neutral tone that is at ...”

“... itch to dig up single spadefuls of the recent past seems somehow fidgety. Choosing to cover such short stretches at a time naturally leads you to insist on how distinct your chosen decade is from the one before and the one after – or else why write about it in isolation? And behind this there presumably lurks the desire to puff up the times we have lived ...”

“... and very little on the ‘low’.Without Model is Adorno at his most relaxed, a sequence of short, sometimes fragmentary texts on aesthetics – a ‘Parva Aesthetica’ – assembled by the author in late life and published in 1967, two years before he died. Much of it hasn’t appeared before in English, which is unusual for a writer whose work ...”

“... about the death of another man, Colin Roach, in a police station; £48,699 to Stephen Dowsett and Philip Tape who were walking home from a dance a little drunk when they were bundled into a police van, taken to a police station and so terribly beaten that Dowsett’s jaw had to be re-set in two places; £17,500 to Manit Schemir, a mechanical engineer who was ...”

“... and whether there have been significant changes in recent years. The immediate questions here, in short, are not those of Marx about the putative overthrow of all élites but those of Pareto about the circulation of élites. At any rate, if this is an inquiry about whether the Establishment as we have known it has now capitulated to the impact of ...”

“... Olivier version, made, like the Branagh version, at a politically sensitive time, was distinctly short of eirenic themes. Not long ago we celebrated two centenaries – of the defeat of the Armada and of the Glorious Revolution. Both confirmed the popular image of the Continent as a source of danger, of monarchical absolutism, expansionist militarism and ...”

“... the tobacco he had smoked as a Clyde-side apprentice before 1914 – and jammed it in his short Stonehaven pipe. He had hopes that my modelmaking might lead to naval architecture. Jane’s Fighting Ships and copies of the Motor Ship would come through the post. I had the interest, and all the shop-talk, but my maths was rotten. Just as well. A hundred ...”

“... depend on the support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor Colley not only puts it ...”

“... anger. Similar feelings remain about Korea. Like Vietnam, it was a ‘limited war’ which fell short of stated goals. The preservation of South Korea was better than the total loss of Vietnam, but less than the ‘liberation’ of the whole Peninsula which American military forces aimed to achieve when they ventured north of the 38th Parallel. Moreover, we ...”

“... to describe in some detail the appearance of an informant: ‘He was black and stocky; in his short-sleeved yellow shirt he looked very casual in the lounge of the Ritz, where that morning they were making a video about the hotel, with a male model, and they were shifting very bright lights about. This was the background to our talk of religion and the ...”

“... Changeling, that bone of contention between Oberon and Titania, here dubbed ‘the Golden Herm’, short for hermaphrodite verus, and afflicted with a terrible cold in the nose. All the fairies are sneezing and sniffing too, and there’s an incurably priapic Puck, making do – since he can’t have the Herm – with a mandrake root. These fairies are not ...”

“... put Mary McCarthy on the spot. Jarrell himself discounted this, claiming hardly to know her: but Philip Rahv at Partisan, who knew her much better, politely declined to print any of the novel, and Jarrell replied by sending him no further articles or poems. Gertrude is certainly his idea of the archetype of the American woman writer, and in this, as with ...”

“... he denounced Edward Jenner’s idea of vaccination as a mere ‘stunt’ which was ‘nothing short of attempted murder’ – he was prepared to believe, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say adopt, the ludicrous ideas of Dr Jaeger. To celebrate the death of his unloved father, who died neglected and poverty-stricken in Dublin in 1885, and to spend ...”

“... Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his long-suffering cousin Peggy. At length and with great care he writes of animals, music and travel, gently encouraging the disturbed boy without condescension. ‘Now you will have to write back, as you promised,’ he ...”