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“... Roscoe, Dickens, Cobden, Bright, Ruskin, Macaulay, Eliot, Gaskell, Arnold, Chadwick and Toulmin-Smith are all there; and so are Tocqueville, Guizot and Sismondi. At some cost to coherence, the star-studded cast rolls by. Nor are the arts forgotten. One reason Hunt so fiercely champions Britain’s old industrial cities is that he loves their ...”

“... reactionary, slanderous), The Wizard of Oz (Fleming; exaggerated, unreal) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Capra; sickening, meaningless) as he strives to live an everyday American life while observing the prescriptions and instructions conveyed from Moscow. The Potemkin steams up the East River, the masses dance in Union Square on May Day ...”

“... lampshade?’ Here and in his more gnomic utterances (‘We are watching some dreary music by Michael Tippett and Daddy keeps saying: “When does the shooting start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of ...”

“... in the 1930s sense, since the pulse of Orwell’s earlier fiction runs right through it. Winston Smith is a latter-day version of Gordon Comstock from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, stuck in a dead-end job (obliterating evidence that conflicts with the new version of history being put out by the Party) and living in a flat which is a futuristic version of the ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the ...”

“... This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of national isolation that Churchill had played up (and vastly exaggerated) in his wartime rhetoric. Do they even believe the ...”

“... to this London post-punk scene of an international idea of what an avant-garde might be,’ Michael Bracewell explained to Kraus. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir ...”

“... effect, only two theories of evolution have ever been put forward,’ writes John Maynard Smith, ‘one, originating with Lamarck ... the other originating with Darwin.’ Such reduction of the scientific corpus to patterns of mutual exclusivity doubtless tells us something about the strategy, if not the logic, of scientific corroboration. It is a ...”

“... for Labour: Alan Howarth and Shaun Woodward (both elected), and Alan Amos (ex-Hexham), who opposed Peter Lilley in Hitchin and Harpenden. The Liberal Democrats did well, but not uniformly. In addition to the two seats they lost, they came close to losing another five. They are still struggling to establish an absolutely secure base and are probably still ...”

“... effects of policy-wonking on circulation. He became a management consultant, author and adviser to Peter Mandelson. Living on Thin Air is, for the most part, a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the ...”

“... love life. Ghastly from the start, Enderby’s lyrics are further debased when he arrives at the Peter Brooke Theater, Terrebasse, Indiana (‘To be or not to be/Smitten by you/Bitten by you ...’), and Shakespeare, outraged, fights back. Enderby is not surprised. ‘We were all warned,’ he says Burgessly, ‘about disturbing his bones. There’s a curse ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”