“... and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself ...”

“... defeating all its surrounding Goliaths. Israel is losing goodwill as rapidly as the US did under George W. Bush, and for similar reasons: nationalist blindness and the megalomania of military power. What is good for Israel and what is good for the Jews as a people are evidently linked, but, until there is a just answer to the Palestinian question, they are ...”

“... glare of summer, trying to avoid the ‘garbage, dung, stench and slander’ of the place, as George Seferis described it, ‘the pestering flies, the beggars, the street salesmen who pushed things in their faces … the yelling, the hooting, the screeching brakes, the clanging of tram-cars and howl of tram-horns’. Lawrence Durrell, who had been living ...”

“... for mostly have to do with his difficulties getting published: ‘My play in French,’ he tells George Reavey of Eleutheria, ‘was almost taken by Hussenot-Grenier,’ while ‘Watt was “nearly” taken in London, I forget by whom’ (a footnote informs us that Herbert Read at Routledge read the novel with ‘considerable bewilderment’ and found it ...”

“... on the cultural politics of André Malraux, and best of all, a brilliantly revealing chapter by Michael Fried on the spectator-centred aesthetics of Diderot in his Salons. The association of words with music is traced from the jongleurs in the 11th century through its successive manifestations as an element of courtly spectacle to interesting chapters on ...”

“... of those with Christian backgrounds who remain uncertain of New Labour’s merits, such as Michael Meacher, an Anglican and ex-Bennite, or the Old Labour heirs to Eric Heffer, a staunch Anglo-Catholic, or Tony Benn, an agnostic who nonetheless argues that ‘the moral roots of socialism lie in religion’ and that ‘political agitation is groundless ...”

“... control of the conventions he uses than St Paul, and the single essay on the Pauline Epistles, by Michael Goulder, does full justice to the Apostle’s originality, and his ability to outsmart his opponents by mobilising the rhetorical devices of his day. With the Gospels, the interplay of individual literary skill and the dictates of literary convention are ...”

“... and all-connecting to pause and magnify. He cites all the other clever British pop authorities – Michael Bracewell, Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds – while replicating their tendency to jump frustratingly between subjects and stiffen up their sentences with jargon. Haslam’s footnotes, interestingly, are much more relaxed and informative. Here he can just be ...”

“... Swales; and the draft notes were prepared for the simultaneous German edition of the letters by Michael Schröter. Masson’s contribution was evidently to polish and edit the translation and to contribute those limited notes which he considered necessary for English-language readers. Rather than informing the reader, he often uses the footnotes – and ...”

“... a year when Ashton felt she was overstepping the boundaries of her research. Like his contemporary George Balanchine, who famously believed ‘Ballet is woman,’ Ashton realised his romanticism through the female form; but the inspiration for his choreographic expression was exclusively male. Demanding and dependent as a lover, and always the pursuer, Ashton ...”

“... criterion of influence, however. A book need only be read by one generation to take lasting root. George Eliot’s encomium is often quoted: ‘It is an idle question to ask whether Carlyle’s books will be read a century hence; if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral pile,’ she wrote in 1855, ‘it would only be like cutting down ...”

“... Two people I knew have died: Maurice Berger, an art critic, curator and civil rights activist; and Michael Sorkin, the radical architect and critic. A friend at the Whitney told me of a staff member in his late forties, a father of two, who had died of the virus.The pain of social distancing and isolation isn’t negligible, but neither is it lethal, and in ...”

“... to soap and, especially, hot water which increasingly differentiated them from the middle classes. George Orwell (born 1903) was, notoriously, taught as a child that ‘the lower classes smell.’ ‘Very early in life,’ he wrote, ‘you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body’; and he quoted Somerset ...”

“... original sin as its schism from New Liberalism, citing its estrangement from ‘Gladstone, Lloyd George, Keynes, Beveridge’. A moment’s thought reveals the fatuity of the diagnosis: Beveridge and Keynes have been the touchstones of the party’s thinking on welfare and economics for most of its existence, such that Labour MPs occasionally forget ...”

“... enough to start with. Right now, the Lib Dems look to me quite like Tony Blair nuzzling up to George Bush. But if I can’t really come up with any government I would have preferred among the options, why am I so appalled? Because, I suppose, pitifully minimal as it was, now there isn’t even a protest vote left. Jenny Diski If it succeeds, the ...”