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“... fantasy is current at the moment. In ‘A Whole School of Bourgeois Primitives’, for example, Christopher Reid designs another version of England caught in a moment of buzzy stasis: Our lawn in stripes, the cat’s pyjamas, rain on a sultry afternoon and the drenching, mnemonic smell this brings us surging out of the heart of the garden: these are ...”

“... Morison’s black suits and Corbusier’s bow tie), Lutyens wore, as his daughter remembers, brown suits, brown shoes, duck-egg green shirts with high starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had black walls (semi-gloss), white ceilings and woodwork, green painted floors and yellow ...”

“... possesses the greatest allure for social conservatives. However, as the philosopher Alexander Brown shows in Personal Responsibility, the subject is more slippery than politicians imagine. How should society determine whether someone’s circumstances mean that they are deserving of its support rather than its condemnation? The philosophical ...”

“... forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of ...”

“... of different kinds of grain crops, alternating with green fields or roots, and here and there a brown fallow, was now an expanse of prairie.’ Street started contributing to the local papers and went on to write dozens of books, with a column in Farmers Weekly and an appearance on Desert Island Discs. Only three minutes of the programme survive, which may ...”

“... to death, in unexplained circumstances, in a high-security prison cell in 1992. His son and heir, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, is the man the Jamaican army and police were looking for when they killed at least 73 civilians in a raid on the Tivoli Gardens estate in West Kingston in 2010. So there are more than enough killings to go around. James begins his ...”

“... is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig Brown’s enterprise not only a marvellous freak of literature but a matchless summoner of our yesterdays. It is a collage, montage or bricolage of glittery bits culled from two hundred biographies, authorised and unauthorised, written by cashiered gossip ...”

“... of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that you ...”

“... his Midas touch.’ In October 2004, he carried the first of a long series of eulogies to Gordon Brown, then ‘odds-on to be prime minister before the end of 2008’. ‘The Brown transition,’ Goodhart wrote, ‘could help to realise the centre-left’s dream of governing Britain for a generation.’ What had ...”

“... profitability did not go up – and Gottlieb was axed in 1992, at which time Newhouse moved Tina Brown over from the editorship of Vanity Fair. Immediately she embraced the mass culture that Shawn had shunned and Gottlieb had parried. (Seabrook tells a signal story of this role reversal. Steven Spielberg comes to visit and asks to see the library. ‘The ...”

“... us, beaming serenely at the back of mat throng in the People’s Palace. In this context, Gordon Brown’s biography of Maxton, now out in paperback, is a brave venture. Maxton did indeed try to ‘save the children’, with furious oratory at Westminster (sneered at as ‘pink’ by Maclean back home). He told how his own wife had lost her life struggling ...”

“... shafts hidden behind massive travertine panels. The svelte column, its steel trimmed in deep-brown bronze, rises over you with tremendous force: the overall effect is of discreet power.[watch]The British architect Peter Smithson, for one, admired the elegance of the skyscraper, then the most expensive ever built: ‘Everything else now looks like a ...”

“... Kettle’s Yard – they in turn patronised other artists. To their house in Cumbria they invited Christopher Wood, who hadn’t managed to sell much, though Winifred, never less than enthusiastic, said of him: ‘Here was England’s first painter. His vision is true, his grasp real, his power is life itself.’ Ben and Kit would go out walking together with ...”

“... of essays, mostly attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond ...”

“... What appealed to the young and to the many who had left the party in disgust during the Blair/Brown years – what appealed to the people who turned the campaign into a genuine social movement – was precisely what alienated the political and media cliques. Corbyn’s campaign generated a mass movement that renewed the base of the Labour Party – nearly ...”