“... One afternoon in May 1995, I rang Ken Loach to try to persuade him to play Fantasy Filmmaking. In fact I had to call a number of British directors, and ask each one to imagine the kind of movie he or she would make given a bottomless budget. ‘An unlimited budget would be a liability,’ Loach said. ‘The more you spend, the more restricted you are because the more money you’ve got, the bigger the investment, the more nervous the investor and the more they dictate what the ending should be ...”

“... always committing yourself to concrete solutions – knows that the man from Reclaim The Streets may have been wise not to answer questions. Ultimately, though, for Lloyd the anti-capitalists’ tactical strengths are also moral weaknesses. Their energy and theatricality and political nimbleness are all substitutes for the more patient, more democratic ...”

“... Littlewood have suggested that she should have had the credit for that renaissance. These matters may be, indeed usually are, overdetermined, but simpler explanations are handier, and in recent years Littlewood seems to have got left out of the story for ease of telling. In the end the value of these writers has to be considered apart from their effect on the ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher quoted on the steps of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister, 4 May 1979: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.’ Thatcher had just called on the queen and no doubt wrote the words as an aide-memoire on the short drive back through St James Park from Buckingham Palace. It is as ...”

“... him in return; and, finally, possessed the offending quarto of the Essays and Treatises (which may or may not have been handsome). ‘Of all this,’ Boswell wrote, ‘I disapproved.’ We are thus thrown back at the text, to use the cant academic word, and Sher’s argument begins to sound a little strained. Are the ...”

“... of memoir, reportage and – for want of a better way of putting it – travel writing. It may be tempting to see some significance in his recent turn to fiction, but perhaps this is to underestimate the porousness of the membranes between different kinds of writing. ‘By the time you’re writing memoir,’ Raban said in a recent ...”

“... he was martyred in Smyrna has suggested to some historians that ex-Jews among the Christians may have been returning to the Jewish fold to escape this worsening persecution. The rise of Christian communities, the sensational stories of their martyrs, and their hostility to Jews reflected, to some extent, the awkwardness of a new religion so deeply ...”

“... when gay sex was a crime. Yet the novel suggests that the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 may not have been such a watershed after all: the law doesn’t protect Will from getting beaten up by a gang of skinheads for being a ‘fuckin’ poof’ and, worse, a ‘fuckin’ nigger-fucker’; one of his friends is arrested for soliciting by a policeman ...”

“... with US breakfast TV. If George Bush can pretend for four months that he has Iraq under control he may well be re-elected. If disasters from Iraq continue to dominate the front pages he will probably lose. In April 125 soldiers were killed: the White House needs to show voters that casualties are on the way down. The appointment of Allawi is itself a ...”

“... private conversations over oil and gas deals in Eurasia. Or both. You never know with Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary ...”

“... on his family coat of arms to bees; that mead doesn’t taste very nice; that Alexander the Great may have been mummified in honey, but then again he may not; that honey from bees which have been foraging in rhododendron flowers is poisonous; and that oxymel, a mixture of honey, water and vinegar, was said by one writer to ...”

“... and is immediately carried headlong downstream. The context for humans’ experience of the world may be presented in this unillusioned way, but the poem is not unrelievedly bleak. Farmers may not be living in the Garden of Eden, but they are not living in the moral corruption of the city either, and Virgil conveys an ...”

“... friaries in 1538, removing at a stroke a host of mainly conservative pulpits. Closing monasteries may have been Cromwell’s downfall, because almost the last to go in 1540 (even later than Durham) was Thetford Cluniac Priory in Norfolk, mausoleum for the Howard family. It is clear that the Duke of Norfolk was battling to save Thetford and turn it into a ...”

“... fad for furry things burst Petrus Gonzales. It is not clear whether he was actually a Guanche. He may have been the son of Spanish settlers, or of mixed ancestry, but his association with the vanquished natives of the Canaries was certainly part of his exotic appeal. He was said to be about ten years old when he arrived at the court of the recently crowned ...”

“... themselves with heroin at the close of this one.’ As Andy Beckett observed in the LRB (10 May 2012), this sort of thing was new for Welsh, the beginning of a punt, maybe, at ‘the great Edinburgh novel’, though he doesn’t seem to have taken it further. And it sounds like a stretch, that ‘line from … the city’s global greatness, to the Aids ...”