“... catastrophe), A Taste of Honey (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Tom Jones (1963), in between visits to direct plays on Broadway and Pericles at Stratford. From 1959 he could hardly be said to have been actively responsible for the running of the theatre or to have had an intimate knowledge of its day-to-day workings, so it is ...”

“... in The Memory of War and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the ...”

“... the subject is generally a grey one some of the characters – Brown, Castle, Wilson, Woodcock, Jones – had colour and some of the events contained high drama. The book does not quite do justice to the sense of desperate exasperation which overcame everyone I know – including Sir Denis – who was obliged during those years to grapple with the ‘union ...”

“... a ride on the greengrocer’s cart? ‘He stopped at intervals to serve Mrs Vigars, Mrs Hill, Mrs Jones, the Misses Gethins, Mrs Harris, Mrs Lane, Mrs Farral, Mrs Hale, Mrs Pike, Mrs Southcourt, Mrs Evans, Mrs Hughes and Mrs Trimnel.’ Or the route she takes as the place expands while she explores it? I counted the streets on the way to the library in Neath ...”

“... and more famous and came under more and more pressure. In New York she met James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones and Langston Hughes, who educated and politicised her. In 1962 she had a baby and a wet nurse was found for the child so she didn’t have to stop touring. A year later Simone finally got to play at Carnegie Hall, not Bach, but Duke Ellington. ‘Miss ...”

“... seems to be alone in hinting, if cartoonishly, at its power; as the post-9/11 efforts of John Updike and Martin Amis show, it is easier to reduce ideological belief to pathologies of sexual frustration, or the ordeal of constipation. A self-dissolving post-ideological irony is the dominant mode of the few narratives about Americans engaged in the ...”

“... 417 pages readers may discover sketches for a major revaluation of utopian socialism (by Stedman Jones), significant new contributions to the debate on the origins of modern capitalism (by Hans Medick), a first-hand account of what history means for working coal-miners (by Dave Douglass), pioneer studies of the Scottish peasantry (by Ian Carter), an ...”

“... suit. In February 1994, Aliyev made an official visit to the UK. He met the prime minister, John Major, and the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, signing a ‘declaration on friendship and co-operation’ between Britain and Azerbaijan. The UK made representations on Azerbaijan’s behalf at the UN, while British special forces and attachés provided ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... Autrey uncharacteristically brays and whinnies like a donkey and horse respectively – Spike Jones-like barnyard cacophony aimed at minstrel Eddie Cantor, Mandy’s plantation and Miz Scarlett herself, shortly before her arrival in Gone with the Wind. The enormous success of Mitchell’s 1936 novel (the film appeared in 1939) only increased the call for ...”

“... and in Madron (the latter given to him and Nessie rent-free for life by the painter Nancy Wynne-Jones), as Graham became less and less inclined to move about. Though he craved new experiences and foreign travel, he couldn’t cope with either, however much he savoured his memories of travel. His trips to Iceland in 1961 and to Crete three years later (more ...”

“... Iraq. Annan, denying any knowledge of the contracts, hired Clinton’s defence counsel in the Jones-Lewinsky affair to ward off charges of corruption. The Volcker Commission, set up by Annan to investigate profiteering from the Oil for Food programme, was obliged to look into the matter. Despite the incontestable fact that Annan had met with Cotecna ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... blow rather than the scrupulous fleck of paint. It’s as if Rodin had apprenticed himself to Gwen John, and that isn’t at all how their story played out. After The Ghost Writer Zuckerman became Roth’s stand-in of choice, in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, the three books being republished in 1985 as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound, with The Prague ...”

“... to Mau Mau in Kenya) took place under another noted Fabian Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Ranger is at pains to insist that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of ...”