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“... almost revivalist in their fervour and the spell they cast over the congregation. So when as a young man I first had thoughts about what nowadays is called stand-up it’s not surprising it took the form of a sermon. Like all parodies it was born out of affection and familiarity and the Anglican services that were in my bones, and there is symmetry here as ...”

“... the book juxtaposes early drawings with later paintings of many of these people: first they’re young, and then suddenly they’re older. David Coster (2005). What is also interesting is that the book includes as well various very beautiful abstract or, rather, non-representational paintings done – in colour – by Bachardy. (These are, in ...”

“... of Forman’s writings and doings. She provides a thumbnail sketch of his life, in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, more text than fact, but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical self-education, visible through his continuing ...”

“... impossible to have any sympathy for a woman who has taken part in the torture and murder of young children makes her case a valuable instrument with which to gauge the objectivity of criminal justice in this country, while the Law Lords’ judgment provides an excellent example of the British judiciary’s habit of presenting their deliberations as if ...”

“... directors were delivering bitter television dispatches about Thatcherism and its repercussions. Stephen Frears’s Bloody Kids, Mike Leigh’s Meantime and Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain revealed more about the Tory menace than anything Loach has come up with to date. These films make a statement that resonates. The images of delegates attending the 1982 ...”

“... unpopular decisions about rearmament. More sympathetically, though with some equivocation, G. M. Young in his official ‘life’ suggested that, whatever the faults of Baldwin’s substantive policies, he at least deserved credit for having forged a united political nation, able to meet the crisis of 1940. Few have been prepared to see much virtue in ...”

“... jurists bring to their cases. Sands portrays the Australian Percy Spender and the American Stephen Schwebel, two judges who served as president of the ICJ in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, as legally enrobed imperial apologists – though he doesn’t quite call them that. During a case brought by Liberia and Ethiopia against apartheid South Africa ...”

“... of poverty’ – he’s not talking about poverty as a social evil here, but giving advice to a young man who wants his father to give him a larger allowance. This is the kind of problem that Epictetus’ version of Stoicism is designed to address: a privileged man is disturbed by the idea that he does not have complete control over every element of his ...”

“... was shown on TV. The film, written by the Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by ...”

“... the liberation of Rome in early 1945 Togliatti came into the headquarters of the PCI to find a young militant preparing copy for L’Unita, the party’s daily newspaper. He was wearing battledress left over from his time with the partisans in the North. ‘Are you very poor, comrade?’ Togliatti asked the startled ...”

“... sole business of her visit is to exercise her eerie powers of thought control and inspire a fresh young man to throw himself into the British firing line, an action without the faintest chance of achieving anything other than the terrible beauty of its sacrifice: ‘They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake,’ Kathleen intones, ‘and for ...”

“... something else again!’ The Pure and the Impure (1932) is Colette’s memoir of her years as a young woman in the Paris of the Belle Époque: sex, drag, public performance, nudity (but never opium, cocaine or ether – she was a fitness freak when she was young). Why Colette, why now, doesn’t seem to be the ...”

“... the assumption of male dominance in family life that Ashbee found most unattractive in his father. Young Ashbee went to Wellington, where he later indicated he had been unhappy, although the school records show him succeeding and conforming. After school, refusing to enter the family firm, he went to Cambridge. He was very happy there: ‘only the best and ...”

“... for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy ardour he felt when he first met her as a young student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912. She was a spur to his imagination, as he tested out new words for deep feeling, and the object of some comic erotic-spiritual exercises. Take this letter from December 1935: ‘When I go to bed I shall imagine ...”

“... them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young Huxley, desirous of one of the few footholds in a poorly-paid scientific profession, to the time when Owen redesigned his dinosaurs to make sure they could not possibly fit Huxley’s phylogeny. Much of the fascination of Desmond’s story stems from the ...”