“... who knocked me flat before I could think, before I knew a thing, leaving me no way back, and took John Keats in a room by the Spanish Steps, stanza della morte, where I caught one glimpse of the flowered beams and fainted fast, and took Pierre Bonnard who delved with me deep in the mysteries of domesticity, year in, year out, leaving me no way back, and took ...”

“... Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is this: Orwell, ostensibly a man of the Left, made his work available to the Cold War ...”

“... the nominees step up to the microphones to address the cheering party faithful in the convention hall, and the nation on television and radio, they will leave behind them the committee wranglings over party platforms and the balloting of the state party delegates which brought them their nominations. Although one nominee will be the incumbent ...”

“... a frame.’ I assume that the Dutch boys, like many others, discovered The Fall by listening to John Peel. There was no MySpace or MTV then, and Peel was a key part of the network through which word spread about these bands. The mainstream media rarely acknowledged Joy Division or The Fall, and with the exception of Mark Radcliffe’s Piccadilly Radio ...”

“... shavings on the floor.I knew that the captain of the Bonhomme Richard had been a Scotsman called John Paul Jones: I had once passed through Kirkbean, the Kirkcudbrightshire village where he was born. And I was vaguely aware that Jones had been involved in a daring raid on Whitehaven in Cumbria, although – since he was said to be the father of the US navy ...”

“... in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to establish the progressive nature of the Catalan enterprise, but both are also laden with medieval ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, the motion of a planetary model into liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of ancient astronomy. The puzzle, now, is to ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”

“... They went down the corridor and turned right, and walked a little way to the first door to the hall. At the other end of the now empty space, where only this morning they had stood distractedly with their hymn-books, the stage was occupied by the Phantom Congregation, who were practising, in resounding fits and starts punctuated by gaps of silence and ...”

“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), 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 ...”

“... now, when they are so far behind in the opinion polls, they propose to recover by transforming John Major into a Europhobic John Bull. The other key to Conservative success was organisation. As Parliamentary reform acts expanded the electorate, the Conservatives recruited a mass membership in the constituencies. These ...”