“... of this kind is the other reason it was a big mistake to think the South was Fascist. It may have been a one-party state, but the Democrats were not a one-state party. Southern Democrats didn’t have a single leader; theirs, as Katznelson says, was a ‘chaotic and anarchic’ organisation, riddled with local variations. More important, it was an ...”

“... channel, a thoroughfare, an axis of change.The basis of Phillips’s oblique affinity with Brontë may lie in their shared conviction that the storyteller, real or imaginary, must already be in place – however uneasily – before the story can be told. The introduction to Phillips’s A New World Order: Selected Essays (2001) sets each of four separate ...”

“... electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus presented by the SNP. Surely, David Cameron reckoned, the same formula would work again a mere two years later in the UK-wide Brexit referendum. After all, there was also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone ...”

“... comma in Shakespeare’s 29th Sonnet. To point out that in fact it is a semicolon that is at stake may not entirely dispel the suspicions of lemon-squeezing pedantry which thus arise, but a reading of Barrell’s chapter on Shakespeare certainly does: he is one of those rare scholar-critics who can make matters of punctuation genuinely interesting. The ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... but not without hope. John Fuller’s The Burning Boys is interested in other kinds of separation. David’s mother is killed in the Blitz, and he goes to live with his down-to-earth grandmother and nubile young aunt. His life goes underground. David covertly observes the strange adult goings-on around him, approaching ...”

“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...”

“... the country’ – that’s to say, with two fictionalisations, at quite different levels, of what may or may not have happened. Her enquiry was eventually modified to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by ...”

“... him. And if he embarks on a memoir of himself, or they on a biography, the falsity of presentation may once again begin. If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in ...”

“... Libération lay beneath a bridge during a firefight near Grozny while shells landed all about him. David Hearst of the Guardian and David Chater of Sky News, who had gone up to the village of Pervomaisk near Grozny to observe the Russian advance, were nearly killed by a shell and sniped at when they ran for cover. Witold ...”

“... to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, I was struck by the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister ...”

“... young photographers from Japan were taking pictures of other young photographers from Japan. It may be pretty ordinary to most children now – who all have paparazzi for parents – but I was still taken aback to see the scrum around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese ...”

“... I can’t say that I’ve ever had a strong opinion – or any opinion – about Sean Penn. I may have watched a film he was in, and I booked but didn’t get as far as the cinema to see The Tree of Life. In future, I’ll be hanging on his every word. He finds Britain ‘colonialist, ludicrous and archaic’ for hanging on to the Malvinas, and refusing to try and come to an agreement with Argentina ...”

“... If the answer is yes, students are encouraged to place an announcement in their college newspaper. David Horowitz, a progressive activist turned conservative pundit, and an ally of SAF, runs an online journal, FrontPage Magazine, which claims 1.7 million hits a month. He has devoted considerable attention to the peace studies programme at Ball State University ...”