“... in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... It’s tit in some way, it’s an infantile comfort. It’s an infantile comfort that is also a black pit.In its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer ...”

“... a translation for the stage by Peter Meineck (1998) and many more free verse or prose versions (by Christopher Collard, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Peter Burian, E.D.A. Morshead and others). Sarah Ruden’s Oresteia (2016) demonstrated that the careful use of English metre, without rhyme, could be used to render Aeschylus in a poetic style that is difficult where ...”

“... Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love in his 1704 pamphlet The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent ...”

“... shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed in hospital-issue clothing and had no personal possessions. I wondered where Beegan kept his pictures. Under a mattress? Inside The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson? Or did he carry them on his person at all times? There is no ...”

“... in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa ...”

“... decision – thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by Stalin and Tito – remain a black and unforgettable chapter. The accusations against Macmillan personally became progressively more pointed in Nikolai Tolstoy’s three polemics: Victims of Yalta (1977), Stalin’s Secret War (1981) and The Minister and the Massacres (1986), which fingered ...”

“... with their faces upward, Lie breathless on the plain … the world stands before me Like a black desert at the approach of night: I’ll lay me down, and stray no further on. Its fourth act is full of echoes, not of the Roman source-play, but of Iago-speech: because Othello, Shakespeare’s most Restoration drama, gives Iago that dangerous dialect ...”

“... of time at the Stud, so much so that the owner, who looked a religious type, with his beard and black fedora, turned up at his funeral, praying like mad in a big voice that drowned out the others. My brother would have a lot of Cutty, one rock at the Stud. And he fed an awful lot of quarters into the pool table. But the owner probably just liked my ...”

“... is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.) One of my favourites ...”

“... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...”

“... had more or less impermeable walls and its contents were more or less homogeneous. Christopher Hann, discussing what he called the ‘Malinowski period’ of early field anthropology, in Social Anthropology (one of the volumes in the Teach Yourself series), underlined the emphasis laid by Malinowski and his disciples and students on the ...”

“... And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged The black tartareous cold infernal dregs Adverse to life: then founded, then conglobed Like things to like . . . It is not only the foundation of the world that is referred to here, but the foundation of the English Commonwealth out of political chaos. The word ...”

“... shattering. The year after the New Verse special a thinly disguised Auden was the star turn in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Lions and Shadows, the first of many mythologising appearances in the reminiscences of his generation: ‘he struck me as being, so to speak, several sizes larger than life,’ Isherwood wrote of the undergraduate genius, whom he ...”