“... he would make the West Indies ‘grovel’; from the same year I vividly remember the 45-year-old Brian Close, without a helmet or chest protection, being repeatedly hit by terrifyingly fast bowling in fading light on an erratic pitch; I was actually in the Caribbean watching the cricket in 1995 when the Australian team led by Mark ...”

“... most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the pleasures of ...”

“... In​ 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism:never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated ...”

“... of the DUP and VUPP, formed in 1974, to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement according to which Brian Faulkner, the then-UUP leader, agreed to share power with moderate Nationalists. Faulkner’s compromise was too much for the UUC – the governing body of the UUP. When Faulkner was ditched by the UUC, he took his followers in the UUP and went off to found ...”

“... The unions’ hold over the British workplace from the 1940s to the 1970s, the historian Robert Taylor concluded in 1994, was ‘always more illusory and less substantial than their many enemies liked to suggest’. The same goes for union militancy in general. The graph of working days lost annually in Britain to strikes and other labour disputes is flat ...”

“... criticised by Dr Johnson, his stock is high among modern editors and experts. According to Gary Taylor he was ‘one of the finest editors of the last three centuries’, while Brian Vickers accounts him ‘the best all-round editor of Shakespeare in this period or any other’. In Shakespeare Restored, Theobald set out ...”

“... two rather watered-down cover versions in Britain – Manfred Mann’s ‘Mighty Quinn’ and the Brian Auger-Julie Driscoll recording of ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ – which further whetted our appetite for the real thing. In June Rolling Stone published an article calling – somewhat in the manner of a Times editorial – for this ‘rough collection of ...”

“... disclosed by companies jumped from just over £8 million to over £15 million. Major-General Sir Brian Wyldbore-Smith, the Party’s director of fund-raising activities between 1980 and 1992, has been reported as saying that the Party received £7 million from foreign backers just before the 1992 election. The honours system has been deployed in a way which ...”

“... six in the morning and I worked all day. But I fell back into drugs. Out of stupidity.’ His son, Brian, a lively seven-year-old, comes in to get his things, and then leaves for school. A little later Pancho’s mother, Francisca, the head of this broken family, comes home. In the street in front of the house, her son plants a very tender kiss on her ...”

“... Rights Movement (and Ellison took a dim view of Baldwin’s involvement), just as writers like Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney avoided active involvement in the public life of Northern Ireland after 1972. (‘Forgive my timid, circumspect involvement,’ Heaney was later to write.) But Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the world of ...”

“... to my mind – ‘had sex’.We might write of reproductive freedom, of justice, what Astra Taylor writes of democracy: it may not exist, but ‘we’ll miss it when it’s gone.’ Well, some will (if the polls are right – but also, fuck polls); some won’t. This will be fractiously, violently contended in coming years, as it has been for ...”