“... of a class-bound nostalgia for social hierarchy, aligns himself with a tradition that goes back to Tom Paine, Milton and the Diggers. This move has structural similarities to the Norman Yoke theory of the 17th century, which claimed that the popular liberties of the Saxons had been (temporarily, for several centuries) suppressed by the alien laws of a ...”

“... to these standing stones and circular cairns that punctuate the fields. In the manner of Hugh Miller, stonemason and essayist, the grain of Ascherson’s thinking is apt to spark off these heathen formations, these ‘ritual spires of condensed fear and memory’, as he calls them, and a melancholic attitude accompanies the notion that the modern age can ...”

“... guilty pleasure – thanks to the performance not of Sam Shepard as the general in command but of Tom Sizemore as ‘the sergeant hacking his way out of the labyrinth’. Sizemore is in fact playing a lieutenant colonel, but he might as well be a sergeant (as indeed he was in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), because we only ever see him in the ...”

“... a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual ...”

“... comes back to the landscape of terns and gulls, to Pip’s encounter with Magwitch on the marshes. Tom Jones, on the other hand, gives its hero the least interpretable name you could imagine. This hero sounds not just ordinary but so ordinary he must eventually become as significant as his guardian, the over-aptly named Allworthy. Giving a character a ...”

“... We see this familiar pattern in the early life of Ephraim Sieff, the son of a Lithuanian village miller, who landed in Hull, thinking he was in America. He took up peddling, but when insulted by a woman at the very first house where he tried to sell his imitation jewellery, he moved out to Manchester, and met a Landsman who got him a job with a tailor. Sieff ...”

“... Norman Mailer. Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of ...”

“... Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in ...”

“... of being questioned. In his opening statement to the jury, the lead counsel for the prosecution, Tom Little KC, quoted extensively from Marten’s interviews as he laid out the case against the couple.Both sides agreed that the sequence of events before the couple arrived on the South Coast was not really in dispute. Marten had discovered she was pregnant in ...”

“... fornicating Frenchmen was only one of about 150 cases that the magistrates heard. There was the miller charged with ‘putting in musty corn instead of sweet’, and selling ‘heavy sacks for light, 2 lb in every sack’. There was the card-sharp up for ‘cozening Giles Hall at decoy’, and another trickster for ‘cheating a Derbyshire gentleman with ...”

“... only denser and even more postmodernly whorled: ‘For whom is the Funhouse a house? … For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at which will represent the revelated transformation of a present we stomach by looking beyond.’ Over the same period, however, things ...”

“... He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for ...”

“... its limits.’ In my own time, punk and its aftermath saw a blizzard of French namedrops: Thomas Miller – the frontman of Television, who died recently – became Tom Verlaine, while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester ...”

“... Knox ‘my kind of murderess’, wondered whether she was a heroine in the mould of ‘Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys everything? Or is she Nancy Drew caught up in Kafka?’ Nathaniel Rich wrote in Rolling Stone: ‘One might expect that the ...”

“... in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate reality, it struck a ...”