“... contribute to a feature on Englishness, the other contributors, the letter says, ‘ranging from Frank Bruno to Calvin [sic] MacKenzie’. I wish, as they say. 26 January. The papers are full of the beastliness of Eric Cantona who kicked some loud-mouthed, pop-eyed Crystal Palace supporter and got himself suspended for it ... for ever, some soccer lovers ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... Boulevard. ‘There lay American genius [and] not a soul was in the room,’ the journalist Frank Scully wrote in his book Rogues’ Gallery: Profiles of My Eminent Contemporaries. ‘Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company except his casket. I’ve seen some pretty magnificent funerals in ...”

“... and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the unfurling, regal drapery behind him (from his collection of Malayan fabrics), to the ...”

“... powerful texts written under his aegis in recent years – the merciless Afropessimism (2020) of Frank Wilderson III, for instance, or Daniel José Gaztambide’s new Decolonising Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch – and see them learning from him to look horror in the face.2This leads me to a difficult central point in Fanon’s ...”

“... on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John O’Rourke, the parish priest of ...”

“... a major figure, with a catalogue of artfully crafted pieces such as Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, his Violin Concerto and the song cycle Les Illuminations. Tippett, by contrast, had barely got going. He had completed A Child of Our Time, but it wouldn’t be performed for another two years. His First String Quartet had reportedly terrified the ...”

“... its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed the toddler James Bulger and were now about to be released. Nothing in her decision turned on a confidential relationship – there was none – between the youths and the press: what mattered was the nature of the information and the risk it posed to their privacy and ...”

“... below and green above. The right-hand figure has something of the rubbery smugness of one of James Thurber’s femmes fatales. The trees – orange, green, pink, yellow – are a little like those in Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes. Matisse had become a law unto himself. He had learnt to follow his own responses to his ‘crude’ colour, to his ...”

“... non-apology, every linguistic squirm took its toll. Byers enjoyed more premature obituaries than Frank Sinatra; so that his demise, when it came, was barely noticed. Stephen who? Was he the Dome conceptualist who jumped ship? Or the official embodiment of bad news? Status revoked, limo withdrawn, the wretched man was exposed to the ultimate humiliation: a ...”

“... as a language of diffusion, inattention, that he inhabits like Daffy Duck in Hollywood. His friend Frank O’Hara once grumbled that Ashbery was ‘always marrying the whole world’; charmingly, the poem ‘Houseboat Days’ itself admits that ‘The mind/Is so hospitable, taking in everything/Like boarders.’ Hence my reference to Hollywood, the chaotic ...”

“... have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after Shakespeare’s company had been adopted as the King’s Men. It has usually been read as an ostentatiously effortless display of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The ...”

“... how to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman tests an ossified ...”

“... claimed to have seen him behind the counter. Then he’d joined the Rep before becoming a star. James Mason was another local boy who had made good, though from what beginnings I wasn’t sure: maybe he’d worked in a gents’ outfitters too.‘Making good’ meant getting out, as you would have to do if you were going to be a film star, but which applied ...”

“... any objection to seeing a Pakistani analyst. As I left he said, very kindly, ‘You have been very frank with me,’ adding: ‘I think you were a lonely child.’I arranged an appointment with Masud Khan from my office in the Treasury, where I was now an economic adviser, and he met me at the foot of the stairs leading to his attic apartment in Harley ...”