“... is bad in a place. This too shall pass one day.’ It doesn’t pass, however. Like the maimed king Amfortas waiting to be touched by the Holy Spear, Sebastian’s hero lives with his open wound: ‘the consciousness of the sin of being a Jew’. The error of the Jews, he reflects, is that they observe too much and think that they, too, are being ...”

“... is not outside the world he criticises, he is part of it, and so are his friends and family,’ Michael Wood wrote in the LRB of 7 September 2000: ‘Social arrangements are foolish and apparently fragile, because they are arbitrary and groundless. Everything about them could be different, and is different in other times and places … And yet it is because ...”

“... to police violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna ...”

“... in 2005 to act as trustee, with directorships given to two royal family officials (Alan Reid and Michael Stevens) and, most recently, the duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s second largest private landowner. The Balmoral estate has been valued at £80 million – assets include the 167-room castle, 81 residential properties, commercial forestry plantations, a ...”

“... he moved to Paris, where he secured powerful clients at court (including the comte d’Artois, the king’s youngest brother and the future Charles X) and in the wealthy Faubourg Saint-Germain. He called himself ‘doctor of the incurable’.But Marat soon tired of commercial medicine. In the 1780s he renewed his pursuit of glory, this time through an assault ...”

“... now spiralling out of control, as Zionist violence increased. In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, British, Arab and Jewish. The following year, after three of its men had been condemned to death, the Irgun captured two British sergeants and hanged them in reprisal. The atmosphere grew dark; Sydney Silverman and Barnett ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”

“... with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then ...”

“... classes would soon have to live without. Six or seven years ago, only Alfred Jarry’s immortal King Ubu could have entertained the idea of the Polish State Symphony Orchestra touring 13 English towns and cities with a programme featuring a slow-motion 50-minute ‘symphony’ by a dissident composer whose name was unknown outside his native Poland. In that ...”

“... stage production. The play was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and the occasion the King’s birthday, 1789. Apparently, the convicts’ efforts to please ‘were not unattended with applause’. It is a queer little episode. The honoured king was mad. Europe itself was a little mad in 1789, one might ...”

“... came the film version of Bright Lights, Big City, an appalling adaptation with wholesome munchkin Michael J. Fox in the lead. Like the film of Less than Zero, it was neutered by Hollywood’s supine acquiescence in Nancy Reagan’s demand that movies and television should not ‘glorify’ drug-taking. The jagged blackness of the original text was ...”

“... she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their ...”

“... and Kant) but by superficial dreamers – people like Edward Bellamy, Henry George, H.G. Wells, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King. These are the people who dangle carrots before democratic societies by suggesting concrete ways in which things might get better – become more democratic, fairer, more open, more ...”

“... mess, muddle and brutalising effects. Anderson’s day job clearly hasn’t made him a militarist. Michael Gove would hate his take on the First World War: he calls the August 1914 celebrations in London ‘a death dance performed by gullible primitives’. The other local actors Anderson brings into the picture perform two related functions: taking some of ...”

“... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...”