“... or any other playwright.”’ And a similarly recommendable though much briefer introduction, Frank Kermode’s to his Riverside edition, confines itself to an elegant review of the play’s problems, chronological, textual and critical. Kermode calls Hamlet ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, but he declines the ...”

“... through this volume of what he would have called ‘good letters’ from this warm, direct, frank and clever man – intensely clever, exceptionally gifted and intelligent – it is impossible not to sense also his elusiveness: the literary quality that parallels his knack of evading not only female but male friends too, like sparkling water. Returning ...”

“... A complicated tenderness, with no macho bluff. Which is the reason so many men feel close to Brian Wilson in a way they never do to Mick Jagger.The Spector blueprint can be heard on Pet Sounds tracks such as ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ and ‘Sloop John B’, although Wilson’s sound is more spectral, diffuse, a ...”

“... Like many ostensibly ancient British rituals, the Promenade Concerts were founded towards the close of the 19th century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even though the former are often disguised or mistakenly perceived as the latter ...”

“... defeated by the union block vote, until he became deputy leader shortly before his death thanks to Frank Cousins, the left-wing leader of the TGWU. His appointment to Attlee’s cabinet after the war can be seen as a concession to the party’s left. As editor of Labour’s house organ, Tribune, Bevan had become the left’s figurehead, and a more effective ...”

“... towards Shoreditch hooted. A distant alarm pulsed. Across a distance which could have been far or close came the tap of a stick, then a few footfalls which died away. That was the very last London fog. Children in Bow had to sleep in their classrooms. Thousands of empty cars were left blocking the North Circular. The Duchess of Kent was unable to reach her ...”

“... when Avedon got back to the US, his father was still alive, ready, as it were, for that final close-up. It was a story he had told before, I don’t doubt; it was neatly turned without being glib and, clearly, he enjoyed the effect it had on me, a complete stranger. But I also believe that it happened exactly as he told it. For days afterwards that pact ...”

“... the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the Cincinnati ...”

“... itself may not have included the bit about ‘being placed on an equality’ or the queen’s frank recognition of the events of 1857-58 as being ‘a bloody civil war’ rather than ‘a mere military mutiny’. But it did enter the Indian consciousness. By 1875, many educated Indians could recite it by heart. Meetings of the Indian National Congress ...”

“... about publication at that time (1981) could not but be aware of a militant particularism very close to hand – that of the print unions. They were where all his concerns intersected, and it is quite difficult to see how he could avoid mentioning them. But manage he does. No one can doubt that these unions were desperately abusive. They asserted and ...”

“... Ern Malley’, written in inspired homage to his newly-discovered hero. The young Sidney Nolan, a close friend of the Reeds, had been fired by Malley’s work and had produced for the cover a dreamy painting that both illustrated and incorporated some of Ern’s most affecting lines from the sequence’s final poem, ‘Petit Testament’: I said to my love ...”

“... all Koss’s talent as a herdsman. It is useless to read it unless the reader already has quite a close knowledge of British party-political history, or a general history of the period open at his or her elbow. Koss, as in his first volume about the rise of the Victorian political press, does not provide a narrative of events but only refers to them as he ...”

“... a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours of Greed in 1923 and then cut (by a studio that had merged to become MGM) down to a quarter of its length. Greed was another depiction of American society and morals, and an extravagant work of ‘art!’, and so was bad ...”

“... She detested coarse language, which Twain had picked up in his knockabout youth. Nor did she like frank language, which was Twain’s stock in trade, and she was equally disturbed, perhaps even frightened, by Twain’s nose for the whiff of hypocrisy. He went for it immediately, much as a Jack Russell terrier would snap at the neck of a mewling kitten. Livy ...”

“... and the other poets of what would come to be known as the Black Mountain School, Duncan paid close mind to Olson’s injunction to ‘USE USE USE the process at all points.’ His distrust of revision was akin to a mystic’s antinomianism: the idea wasn’t to abandon form but to commit himself to ‘a faith in the voice’s telling that we ...”