“... lugubrious TV cleric, the Reverend I.M. Jolly, to the non-fictional ‘Ferry Reverend’, Angus Smith, whose protest against the introduction of Sunday sailings to Skye in 1965 came to an end when police carted him off the slipway. Such images inspired Tom Nairn’s counterblast that ‘Scotland won’t be free until the last minister is strangled with the ...”

“... elsewhere on the island, or even as lieutenant to a completely different pirate ‘king’ called John Plantain. It’s a confusing picture. ‘What,’ Graeber asks, ‘is one to make of all this?’In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia he tries to answer this question. As the title suggests, for Graeber there is more at stake here than one would ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... and felt herself ‘completely at home’ with them. In the person of the ‘gentle and amiable John Aked’ she entered, too, into the first of her intense relationships with working men. The journey to Bacup, though she calls it ‘sentimental’, was also, by her own account, the launching-pad for her lifelong work as a social investigator; as her diary ...”

“... he arrived in Grantchester he’d taken advantage of the relative privacy to seduce Denham Russell-Smith, the younger brother of a schoolfriend, in what he later told Strachey was a deliberate attempt to ‘do away with the shame (as I was taught it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James and Norton and Maynard ...”

“... untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without ...”

“... a wallpaper brush. I go to an uninformative briefing with my new friends in the RAF. Group Captain John Fynes says: ‘I’ve been told I’m not to lie to you.’ I ask if this is a new policy.28 February. I am due to have lunch with Entisar, an Iraqi woman living in Kuwait I met when I was here a few weeks ago. She thinks I look like Tony Blair, which I do ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had sponsored, going ...”

“... years in one significant respect: his freedom from adherence to natural fact. That would, as Greg Smith argued in an illuminating recent essay, have set him squarely against one of the main aesthetic assumptions shared by his contemporaries.* ‘Nature is not at all the standard of art, but art is the standard of nature,’ runs one of the aphorisms Herbert ...”

“... anyone vote for Barack Obama? Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no ...”

“... Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass in spring. You can make a case for John Davis or Sir Richard Hawkins, just as if you are not English you can make a case for some earlier Iberian voyage. The articles ‘Falkland’s Islands’ in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica give the honour to the English as if there was ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”

“... Beasts in interest. The volume has a valuable seventy-page introduction and some useful notes by John Haffenden, who arranges the material as far as possible in chronological order. The play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson ...”

“... had been Modern; by the time of Pleasures of Architecture (1924), Functionalist. The Tragedy of John Ruskin (1928) retained the scorn and condescension but had, now, some sense of a Labour ethos. By the time of Left Review and The Big Firm she was hitching the proletarianisation of literature to a pretty crude economic determinism – an affair she would ...”