“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... the Mind of a Young Neet’, by the policy adviser Shuab Gamote and long-time Labour wonk Peter Hyman, includes dozens of moving testimonies from those who have fallen between the cracks of employment, education and training. These are a reminder that beneath the crude statistical classifications there are thousands of unique stories of complex ...”

“... wrong?Puritans emerged from chaos. Luther’s wish that the laity act as their own priests, reading vernacular Bibles, bred contention not just between traditionalists and reformers but among the reformers themselves. Everyone had their own idea of what the new order should be. Some were content with modest alterations to the liturgy. Saints, for ...”

“... sometimes eyeballing the camera, sometimes sweetly looking down:The author of the work you are now reading is a scared little shit. She’s frightened, forget what her life’s like, scared out of her wits, she doesn’t believe what she believes so she follows anyone. A dog. She doesn’t know a goddam thing she’s too scared to know what love is she has no ...”

“... sounded like – nothing much in fact, it was more the silence afterwards – as you sat in the reading room; and there is the more exact memory of the rest of that Friday night in the mad, panicking city, watching each parked car with a numb mixture of suspicion and disbelief, drinking in Toner’s pub until the early hours, the music on the radio, the ...”

“... Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, which whammed him from every angle. (Styron, reading the galleys, goes down the checklist: ‘I’m a racist, a distorter of history, a defamer of black people, a traducer of the heroic image of “our” Nat Turner.’) Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979, was a more calculated risk, the non-Jewish author ...”

“... to list. But it will delight the Sun and the Daily Mail which is its intention. 27 January. A reading of the new draft of The History Boys at the NT Studio gets off to a bad start when half the cast are found to be reading from a first draft and the rest from the revised version. It’s a scratch round-up of whoever’s ...”

“... possession of competencies and techniques that are now obscure. Today the kind of food-letters in Peter Binoit’s Still Life with Letter Pastries (c.1615) – a pretzel-like ‘P’, ‘R’ and ‘B’ next to a silver plate of capon and olives – don’t carry much cultural capital (alphabet spaghetti at your dinner party?), but in the 17th century such ...”

“... account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more rigid or frigid lords and ladies, and the relaxed culture of the country house. But in some significant passages his vision is strongly coloured by German Romanticism. No ecclesiastical building still in use impresses him ...”

“... a hole, laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around. I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as well as the Star and the People. It may ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... the real purpose of the UN Resolutions, then where does that leave our Modern Empiricists, our Peter Jenkinses and Hugo Youngs, our Edward Mortimers and Gerald Kaufmans and Paddy Ashdowns? Their ‘practical approach’, their faith in the ‘cock-up theory of history’, their insistence that political events must be judged as they come, each by ...”

“... frightened men, their obsession with the surface of femininity, and their lack of women.’ After reading this essay and (for example) the essay on Pollock, it wasn’t clear to me why it mattered, in terms of Berger’s notions of painting, whether a painting is thought to cling to the surfaces of things or to offer those surfaces as intimations of the ...”

“... cool, all those dancing lessons, all culminating, two hundred years later, in nonsense like Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, with all the while the bitter reality of the taxman, the press-gang, the whore, the rope, the dead child, the waste, the stolen apple. And all those books, about all those things. Madness. It’s a moot point as ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”