“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... and impoverished, his house a ‘shack’, dark except for the gleaming cockroaches. As the poet David Constantine pointed out in a discussion with Berger, ‘for the bulk of the poem’ Césaire is ‘not celebrating his country, he’s saying what a shit, awful place it is’. He saw himself as facing up to the reality of his underdeveloped homeland from ...”

“... owners (the shareholders)? The question is as old as the joint stock company as a legal form. Adam Smith suspected the answer was ‘no’. In Volume III of Capital, Marx warned that directors might swindle shareholders, although he also welcomed the growing separation of managerial control from legal ownership as a transitional step towards socialism. In ...”

“... the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people. It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised ...”

“... by rock stars, stylists and designers seeking ideas for sets and costumes on movies like the David Essex vehicle That’ll Be the Day. But McLaren grew tired of nostalgia, feeling ‘lost in dead tissue’ as he later put it, and increasingly frustrated by the small-mindedness of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast ...”

“... other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”

“... Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the barren and would-be suburban land. The heavens opened and the sky streamed ink; it poured with hope and ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight years: grouchy, standoffish, a dissipated cleric. Ghosting everyone, ghosting poetry itself, Rimbaud stops writing aged nineteen and disappears like a magician’s ...”

“... of artists, astronomers and Kew gardeners, brought back the first vision of the Pacific. Bernard Smith, the Australian historian of art and exploration, argues that these voyages were the first to flood Europe with, literally, images of new lands, new peoples, new worlds. Perhaps thanks to the fashionable enthusiasm at the time for anything to do with ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”