“... fact. He has a sharp nose for the chicanery inherent in Athens’ hard-scrabble politics; he has read, and profited by, a remarkable amount of modern scholarship, by no means all of it in English. Best of all, he never lets us forget those complex and class-ridden family relationships that were, paradoxically, the main driving force behind ...”

“... by the man who will be our next prime minister.’ Matthew Goodwin, a presenter on GB News, read off a litany of violent crimes committed by asylum seekers and implored the audience to ‘take back your country’, promising to ‘weaponise these issues all day long’. It was time to ‘start putting the security of the British people and our children ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor ...”

“... I see it, and now that I’m in the joke very funny it is too. But it increases my doubts about Peter Wollen’s piece on Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo, which is part of, which in fact comprises, that section of the anthology labelled ‘Women, Mexico, Revolution, Art’. Frida and Tina are, allegedly, revolutionary Mexican artistic women, linked also by ...”

“... Doctor’s last four incarnations (in reverse order: Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison), though obviously no match for Tom Baker – at the controls of a souped-up Tardis. As I write, he’s at the mercy of a gang of obese aliens who’ve long been lurking behind the scenes at Downing St, and for complicated reasons have just staged ...”

“... I assume, to one of the more famous images of the Holocaust. Here was the Terrorist section. Peter Jennings’s ABC news feed from 9/11 is piped in from somewhere under a stuffed animal, near some wires and a computer memory board. Yellow crime-scene tape wraps itself like a yellow ribbon around the top of the plexi fence, at waist height. Upstairs is a ...”

“... received by ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’. But ‘Modern Fiction’ is rarely read in context. On either side of it in The Common Reader, like the cladding on a nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for ...”

“... it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that the strike, far from representing an upsurge of working-class militancy, was ‘all about one man’ (as the Queen said to Routledge when visiting the Times) is ...”

“... this accusation sounds both pointed and specific, it is in fact maddeningly vague. Most critics read Beatrice’s anger as a response to Dante’s dalliance with the donna gentile, but they differ as to whether his sin was amorous, intellectual, or both. The second charge is the more serious. Mere jealousy would have demeaned Beatrice’s exalted ...”

“... quite different. Still, it’s a good performance, however stage-managed. We meet a man who has read enormously, is generous about other writers, has not grown old mentally, is often very funny and has what seems to me an unfailingly accurate view of the qualities of his own work – not the most common capacity among neglected or un-neglected ...”

“... for siuzhet is also “plot”.’ This makes perfect sense in spite of the mischief, and echoes Peter Brooks’s thought in Reading for the Plot (1984), still the indispensable book on this subject: ‘“Plot” … seems to me to cut across the fabula/siuzhet distinction … Plot could be thought of as the interpretive activity elicited by the distinction ...”

“... interpretations of the period by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Steven Mullancy and Peter Stallybrass (among others) and a chapter on Othello. This is less a translation than a new study in its own right. One of the great virtues of Shakespeare’s Festive World is the scrupulous care with which its investigations are conducted. Arming himself ...”

“... with gender, which involves the perception and social construction of those differences. And as Peter Burke points out in his foreword to this short but intriguing book, even historians of gender (and there are now a few of them around) have not made much of the subject of transvestism as it is explored by these two Dutch historians. Yet, as Burke also ...”

“... past espionage is obscene partly because fact and fiction have merged: Blunt, Bill Haydon, Smiley, Peter Wright seem by now all at the same distance. This obsession with espionage is that of investigators, of unmaskers. Its motives even with regard to secrecy are complex. It is obvious that the need to unmask and then unmask again assorted Cambridge spies is ...”

“... other week, I went up to the Compendium bookshop in Camden Town, London NW1, to hear Iain Sinclair read from his latest novel. And read he did, the bit about the floating science fiction convention, from towards the end of Radon Daughters. The heavy metal lads rushed the bar and stayed there, chucking their empties over the ...”