“... chichi, Bobo enclaves. There are other extra-textual resonances: the Maigrets live on boulevard Richard-Lenoir – around the corner from the Bataclan concert hall, which was to become world famous in the attacks of 2015. The desperate, vulnerable, weak, politically radicalised perpetrators of those recent crimes were ...”

“... fuck you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play ...”

“... We talk about voices, beards and great moon-faced Welsh actors. He has been to the Galápagos with Richard Dawkins. I almost ask, why? He says if Shakespeare had been born on a beach we would never have had the plays. Well, we would have, but they would all be called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a brisk-moving ...”

“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere – has turned many political thinkers, including Richard Seymour, Dagmar Herzog, Christina Wieland, Claudia Leeb and Joan Braune, back to the puzzle that preoccupied Reich and other left Freudians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, that of the psychic allure of authoritarian strongmen, blood-and-soil nativism and ...”

“... and fifty dollars in my pocket’. In New York, she took in work by Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Yvonne Rainer. Babette Mangolte introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a loop: ‘a three-hour ...”

“... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at ...”

“... 1993, accompanied by his friend Duwayne Brooks. They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ‘What? What? Nigger!’ as the youths approached. From here on, there is no ...”

“... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...”

“... in the play of a great free-wheeling exercised intelligence (‘I will walke heere in the Hall ... ’tis the breathing time of day with me’) makes the work what it is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended ...”

“... them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took it from life.It’s not a particularly remarkable image, just the sort one comes across by accident, one of the many that illustrated the Brontës’ novels and books about them, as well as romances of famous ...”

“... Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier ...”

“... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...”

“... only a mild demur regarding the medical evidence) the judgment by the cultural theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic that ‘the immediate short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behaviour and even suicide.’ He has to treat the nonsense ...”