“... of contemporary critics: much less to their own opinions. When Novel on Yellow Paper appears, we are told of the ‘mandarin approval’ of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and ...”

“... event . . . ruthlessly resets all ecological clocks’, ending urban civilisation as we know it. As Davis has shown in his two devastating books on the political economy of disaster, Ecology of Fear and Late Victorian Holocausts, the combination of untamed capitalist development, indifference to the environment and disregard for ...”

“... James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as ...”

“... queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007 – the idea that we might be living through our own version of the 1930s has proved irresistible. The run on Northern Rock augured a financial collapse on the scale of 1929, and has been followed by the re-emergence in the West of protectionist posturing, authoritarian ...”

“... has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deep zones, a safe spot ...”

“... Southern Reconstruction governments, a national railroad strike, and the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer and his men by warriors of the Lakota Sioux and other Native American nations (Custer’s Last Stand). Each was seen as a battle in which more primitive people stood in the way of national progress. Increasingly, divisions along the lines ...”

“... personified, with an authority that seemed to emanate, via Freud and Schoenberg, from the Burning Bush, which made him vastly appealing to anyone possessing the juvenile desire to be told what to think. The unforgettable voice, ubiquitous in print and on the air, posed paradoxes, puns and provocations. ‘Hans Killer,’ oft-quoted in Pseuds’ Corner, became ...”

“... knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far ...”

“... that ‘belong’ elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’, what they do over there, defines ‘here’, what we do in our shop; the identity of an activity, that which enables you to know it when you see it, is radically dependent on everything from which it would be distinguished. Nothing stands alone; no discipline is an island; no fact – be it ...”

“... The question of how we are to take Iris Murdoch’s characters (indeed, whether we can take them at all) is raised, even before we get to know them, by their names. In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens ...”

“... Braun) who drooled over her ‘personality compulsion, something of the Führer Kontakt’. And it George Younger, then Secretary of State for Scotland, who remarked of her post-Falklands address to the Scottish Conservative Party in 1982, that it reminded him of ‘the Nuremberg rally’. Countries which believe themselves to be in a mess are easily attracted ...”

“... a passing reference in early accounts of the colony to a convict 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 ...”

“... Labour found difficult to grasp. Corbyn spelled it out himself in one of the TV debates: We also as a party have to face up to something which is an unpleasant truth, that we fought the 2015 election on very good policies included in the manifesto but fundamentally we were going ...”

“... Sheena and I weren’t like that, but then I don’t remember going to many parties. Instead, we drove around Scotland, and went to a lot of plays – my first piece in the LRB was about seeing Happy Days with her at the National. ‘In as much as I thought I could know someone, I thought I knew her,’ I’d say, though when I Google her now, I still ...”

“... are deployed in almost every country in the world. The point of covert action, of course, is that we’re supposed to know very little about it. But here the system falls down, since even secret operatives can’t help the occasional boast. After every famous mission – an assassination, a ‘rescue’, a counterinsurgency strike – former special forces ...”