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“... improved text of a major poet in its amplified context. It is hard on Shelley, and doubly hard on Paul Foot, to turn to his book after the Byronic feast. Foot is modest about his own professional credentials – he charmingly quotes the equally charming observation of the Shelley scholar G.M. Matthews: ‘I do not think you err on the side of pedantry.’ The ...”

“... body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of the ...”

“... Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at Christmas. Andrew Davies symbolised the great success of 1990s BBC drama: the reinvention of the classic serial, whose high points (including Davies’s Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch) were produced under the wing of Michael ...”

“... Nonconformist radicals of the 17th and 18th centuries described by Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson. He pauses, for example, over the Black Panther leader David Hilliard’s painful account of his attempts to understand Frantz Fanon (‘I’m lost. I have the dictionary in one hand, the book in the other, and I can’t get past the first page’). Yet ...”

“... pursued. Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle ...”

“... an innocent himself. It’s hard to be the tough guy when your hairpiece keeps slipping, so Verita Thompson, a hairdresser and wig-maker, became a trusted presence in his life. Their affair went on for years, and he never had a hair out of place. This isn’t happy reading if you treasure Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, her with an itch above her knee and ...”

“... Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, 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 ...”

“... a foothold in the establishment they were criticising: in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead’ and laughing at ‘the society that had reared them’.The four cast members of Beyond the Fringe soon decamped to New York, where the revue ...”

“... you’re the one trying to hold it together or the one who’s trying to prise the sides apart.Paul Gilroy – one of Hall’s many illustrious former students – suspects it was frustration with New Labour, and what it did to left politics, that led Hall in the 1990s to spend more and more time working on ‘less depressing’ Black Arts projects ...”

“... of articulating “the identity of their interests”’ (the phrase is taken from E.P. Thompson). There is absolutely no evidence for this. It relies on a wishful view of the 99 per cent and an absurd caricature of the 1 per cent, who are described as having been revealed ‘as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly ...”

“... hats.’ In addition to resembling – a bit too perfectly – Dupont and Dupond, aka Thomson and Thompson, long-running comic foils to Tintin, the twins had a background that Hergé never spoke of. They’d been born out of wedlock, father unknown, and treated kindly, six years later, by a countess who hired their mother as a chambermaid at a grand estate ...”

“... aren’t they? Are they? A generation ago, the historians E.J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E.P. Thompson demonstrated that even rioting crowds are ‘not fickle, peculiarly irrational, or generally given to bloody attacks on persons’. Their conclusions have been confirmed by three decades of historical case-studies of violent crowds in England, Europe and ...”

“... for easy targets in the Green Belt. Binding, dipping through the casebooks, makes use of the Thompson/Bywaters affair (having to insist that his character is called ‘Ethel’ not ‘Edith’), nods at the police killer Harry Roberts in his Epping Forest hide, as well as contriving a transatlantic shipboard conclusion in homage to Dr Crippen. In all ...”

“... finally got round to recognising the only physical hero of the story, a decent guy named Hugh Thompson who saw what was going on, landed his helicopter between Lieutenant Calley’s killing-squads and the remnant of the inhabitants, called for back-up and drew his sidearm. His citation had taken thirty years to come through. It was intended as part of the ...”

“... that were to emerge out of the late 1960s, or connect the thinking of Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall et al with other strains of thought that also challenged the accepted borders between the political and the personal. So, while Sandbrook has considerable fun with the chaotic Albert Hall poetry festival of June 1965 (the poetry mostly ...”