“... under threat, but the historical certainties of Marxism lie undisturbed. ‘Broadly speaking,’ Peter Linebaugh tells us, ‘the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces. The bourgeoisie, led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the ...”

“... Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from the Board’s ...”

“... all the poetry. None of these books has the scope or importance of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Peter Ackroyd’s Ezra Pound and His World brings together 111 photographs, drawings and other illustrations and offers a linking text summarising the poet’s life and literary career. The biography – inevitably, I suppose – draws heavily on the work of ...”

“... said Henry Porter was a Negro.’ In the version that was finally published, this was altered to read ‘was an illegitimate’ – making nonsense of many passages that follow. (The original distinction survives in the French translation, Ciel de nuit: ‘avait du sang nègre’.) In his posthumous memoir, Kafka Was the Rage (1993), Broyard avoids referring ...”

“... breadbin upstairs – the revenge of the English swot! – and I went out to the swingpark to read one and to fantasise about becoming the West of Scotland’s first international male netball champion. Hating football was a real task round our way. For a start, my brothers were really good at it; the fireplace had a line of gold and silver strikers ...”

“... could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms. We are a long way from Tacitus, upon whom time has taken its revenge by ...”

“... true that some modern art has imitated the primitive energy, the folk spells, of graffiti. Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters, a quarterly ‘journal of the fine arts’, launched last spring, challenges many of the fashionable practices and assumptions which I have just reviewed. At first, its opponents in the art world said it wouldn’t last, then ...”

“... scaring birds, bookkeeping for the parish overseer. Like John Clare, who escaped to the woods to read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to squirrel away halfpence when he was meant to be making money for his ...”

“... added much later. Nowhere else have I seen the Second War called a ‘great’ war. 10 June. I read somewhere that the Romans used to crucify tigers to discourage others of their species from preying on humankind. On much the same principle, though less epically, gamekeepers nailed up the carcasses of crows and moles. Nobody, so far anyway, has suggested ...”

“... Stories rely on mystery. Who killed the old lady? We don’t know, so we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the culprit’s identity, and know they’ll be caught, but we read on to find out how, and why they did it ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...”

“... Her name was Sophie Catchprice. She had bell-bottomed jeans and long blonde hair like Mary in Peter Paul and Mary. She had bare feet and chipped red nail-polish on her toenails. She stood at the door of her bedroom one Saturday afternoon and saw her husband sucking her younger son’s penis. What’s admirable here is that Carey manages not only to shock ...”

“... however much some would wish it otherwise. There is thus nothing untimely in the publication of Peter Clarke’s elegant and absorbing book. Dr Clarke writes it consciously as a historian, and though he generously acknowledges the work of those students of Keynes who are economists, his approach is primarily historical. He works on two ...”

“... with malice aforethought and for publication, to the diaries of Pepys who did not mean to be read. This is not to say that the Lyttelton Hart-Davis correspondence has not been found to be immensely readable. In his introduction to the sixth volume the editor explains that when the first of the volumes was ready for the press in 1978 he ‘had no great ...”