“... cover his own basic dullness. He remembered the visits Wilde made to his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown: Mr Wilde was a quiet individual who came every Saturday, for years, to tea … Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford ...”

“... a setting – just as Empson had prefigured – fit for her audience with a goddess. Pamela Brown, a statuesque student contralto, played Minerva.‘It is, I believe, the first time English royalty has been given the real old flattery for three hundred years,’ he told his publisher when requesting that the masque be included in his Collected ...”

“... himself for being subject to them.He had been trying to finish his fellowship dissertation on ‘John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama’ (he did win a fellowship, but not until 1913). He wasn’t sleeping; Olivier said he seemed ‘dotty & queer’, liable to say or think ‘horrors’. He didn’t even pay all that much attention to the publication of his ...”

“... are a gang of reckless and clueless thugs enacting their 9/11 revenge fantasies on whatever brown-skinned men happen to be at hand. There have been 779 detainees at Guantánamo; of 517 men being held in 2005, 80 per cent had been handed over by Afghans and Pakistanis for $5000 bounties, resulting in not a few senseless detentions. Slahi recounts one of ...”

“... children scavenging for things to sell. Around 1860, a 13-year-old Irish boy, ‘dressed in a brown fustian coat and vest, dirty greasy canvas trousers roughly-patched, striped shirt with the collar folded down and a cap with a peak’, told Henry Mayhew that he and his younger brother spent their days gathering lumps of coal, iron rivets, bits of ...”

“... Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ‘cancel culture’, though she doesn’t – and makes a plea for a ...”

“... Yet none of this stood in the way of his extraordinary prominence from 1931 to 1945. In a way, as John Strachey observed perceptively, ‘the unresolved themes that ran through his books, articles and speeches ... [were] his main strength. It was just this that gave him his hold over the minds of a whole generation of the British Labour Movement. After ...”

“... surplus. By that summer, following Labour’s loss of office and the defeat of George Brown in his Belper seat, he had become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and heir-apparent to the leadership. But within eighteen months the dispute about Britain’s membership of the Common Market had torn Labour apart. Roy Jenkins had resigned as Deputy ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... of correspondences between colour, shape and sound is ruined under the collective onslaught of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and ‘happenings’ (Gesamtkunstwerk with a Beatnik twist). These ideas started to gain focus and coherence in the 1950s, just as the technology became available to realise them, and yet ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the most recognisable, though I prefer Myrtle Gordon in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is in the twilight of her career and bent on sabotaging the play for which she’s currently rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her ...”

“... A new deputy headmaster came to the school; you could tell by looking at his hair that he was all brown rice and liberal experiment, so I wrote him a well-spelled note about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I remember the day and the very hour. ‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’ I walked the few yards onto the ...”

“... solutions to the present crisis. The traditional social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their ...”