“... have nothing so fierce to show. He took more risks in his first novel, the picaresque-satirical Malcolm (1959), but his novel-writing career amounts to a series of lurches towards explicitness and even extremity, alternating with retreats to safer ground. His second novel, The Nephew (1961), is the most consistently acclaimed of his books, and is written in ...”

“... bone helmets of snatch-squads. The mob awaits its impresario. Some shockheaded Struwwelpeter. A Malcolm McLaren whispering of historical precedents: Tyburn, the Gordon riots, Newgate ablaze, ‘Dickensian’ revengers pouring out of the slums and rookeries. It could catch on. It could be the next buzz. What was being declared here was not so much a class ...”

“... example of the man on the cross is what makes it so. I once argued with my mother, Diana Wynne Jones, about the conclusions to her best books, The Homeward Bounders and Fire and Hemlock, both of which end in a similar way, with the main characters appearing to give up everything, including people they love, in order to anchor or reconstruct the rest of the ...”

“... they asked for anonymity. One presenter told me of being ‘grabbed’ in Broadcasting House by Malcolm Muggeridge, who spent most of his time in the 1960s railing against the permissive society, ‘pot and pills’. The Muggeridge grope wasn’t welcomed but it didn’t seem totally irregular to the person on the receiving end. She could name at least one ...”

“... surrogates and key supporters constituted a sort of misogyny army – or as Star Jones, the former host of the talk show the View put it, ‘Newt Gingrich, Giuliani and Chris Christie: they’ve got like the trifecta of misogyny.’ The army included Steve Bannon, who as head of the alt-right site Breitbart News hired Milo Yiannopoulos and ...”

“... Interests for April 1994 shows the former whip and foreign office minister Tristan Garel-Jones to be an adviser to British Gas, the Union Bank of Switzerland and the civil engineering group Biwater International. David Mellor has amassed 12 paid consultancies since resigning from office, including Racal Tacticom, Ernst and Young, Short ...”

“... less could be said of Orrell’s account of the structure of the original Globe and the Inigo Jones designs for indoor theatres. The book’s scholarship, its commitment, its good intentions lie manifestly beyond dispute. However, there are difficulties.The first and most obvious one lurks in the linked notions of ‘reconstruction’ and ...”

“... generation, and regarded skirted women as autofructiferous.’Gass in his 1993 afterword mentions Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Finnegans Wake and Moby-Dick; Tom McCarthy in his new introduction invokes Döblin, Laforgue, Plato, Shakespeare, Derrida, Bataille and Adorno. Sensibly neither makes reference to Gide’s The Counterfeiters, published in 1925, whose ...”

“... celebrate texts not as embodiments of moral truths but as perpetual, festive comedies of errors. Malcolm Evans’s essay on ‘Deconstructing Shakespeare’s Comedies’, which is itself highly ludic, shows how the ideas of Derrida and Bakhtin can be applied to the polysemous discourses of these ‘carnivalesque’ plays. But he is uneasily aware that ...”

“... commissioned England’s first classical building, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, from Inigo Jones, and masques from Ben Jonson – nicely summed up by Gareth Russell as ‘light on story and heavy on cost’. James was less enamoured of his new subjects. As he made his way down through England to take the throne, he became exasperated with all the ...”

“... other kinds of rebel sensibility around the world: you only have to think of Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ to know how easy it was to sneer at people on the outside – a journalist in Dylan’s case – who just didn’t get it. It’s obvious from old issues of OZ and IT that Britain wasn’t about to go through anything ...”

“... saints find themselves forever knackered by sadist-authoritarian bullies or preached at in Malcolm Rifkind English by bien pensant hypocrites and child molesters? One easy answer now itself a form of cant might be the Post-Modern alibi: there are multiple or equivalently-valid identities co-existing in no special order of significance. Another, I ...”

“... ills.Could the left have defended a Lexit? The idea was floated by journalists like Owen Jones and Paul Mason in the early days of the campaign. Both quickly retreated when they realised that the mainstream left had nothing positive to say to its constituencies. They felt that supporting Brexit in the context of a campaign dominated by ...”

“... In his remarkable Proust among the Stars, the one study of A la recherche equal to its splendours, Malcolm Bowie observed with justice that while Time in this mode is ‘a “big” controlling theme’, calling forth ‘an impressive philosophical diction’, it ‘levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing’ in ways that can be ...”