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“... at our heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were ...”

“... at least three forms of academic study which would seem to constitute a challenge to it: Feminism, Black Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. Surely the effects of feminism extend far beyond the academy’s precincts and surely feminists who actively work in the public sphere make use of arguments and slogans developed and elaborated in the classroom and in ...”

“... growing up in a tough but precariously self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the ...”

“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”

“... but not by the thought of the poll tax. It happened to be the same cabinet meeting which Michael Heseltine had stormed out of, to tell the waiting press that he was resigning from the government over the Westland issue. That was the big story, for politicians and journalists alike. The poll tax became an afterthought. The press didn’t pursue it ...”

“... for the Criterion, and he was a shrewd judge of the poetry of his contemporaries. It is true that Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse, which came out in 1936, gave her as much space as any poet; but, even though it contains arresting things, her verse is curiously unmemorable and has not worn well. She and Graves shared the feel for a classic ...”

“... is concerned? During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such ...”

“... but swimming trunks, whereupon ‘finally, the Vice President, Mr Garner – teeth like tiny black pearls and a breath that was all whisky – came down from the chair and said: “Senator, this boy is nekkid.”’) He enlisted in the US Navy at the age of 17, and published a novel about his experiences, Williwaw, two years later; wrote five more novels ...”

“... Books’, ‘Stories 1900-1939’ and so on – splendidly produced, with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and giving a good indication of what’s been available at various moments during this interesting period. We have only to glance at the catalogue to see how the Edwardian idea of manliness was purveyed for adolescent boys (‘A Lad ...”

“... happy warrior of Volume One. To mark the difference of tone, or perhaps out of mere incompetence, Michael Joseph have arranged matters so that the two volumes don’t match, whether in dust jackets or out of them: clashing cloths, misaligned lettering, ill-assorted portraits. Only face up and side by side do they make a pair, as though the publisher ...”

“... good one – about 40,000 pounds more a year.’ The Langhornes were a loyal clan (Nancy’s son Michael Astor called his memoirs Tribal Feeling), so it’s not surprising that Nancy was always giving money to her poorer sisters and buying them houses, nor that she financed her eldest child throughout his life. Bobbie was chucked out of the Army for being ...”

“... hacked about and generally sanitised before becoming the manifesto. The idea, I gather, was that Michael Foot himself was to do the job ... But either he was caught short by Mrs Thatcher’s abrupt decision, or had simply forgotten, or had found it all too much for him; at any event he arrived without anything to show, and the document simply became the ...”

“... to the complexity of its organisation. The ending of ‘Morpho Eugenia’ made me think of Michael Heseltine. The story opened up the deep mines of the realist novel only to shut them down with the ruthless logic of allegory and fable. William Adamson, the son of a Yorkshire Methodist butcher, is an entomologist who has spent ten years in the Amazon ...”

“... now the one being followed, hopping off it again. Okotie says his trilogy was ‘inspired by a Black man, known as Marigold, who was often seen in Norwich during the 1980s unofficially directing traffic on the inner ring road wearing yellow rubber gloves’. From Marigold it’s a short step to Marguerite (a name which also fuses Maigret and Magritte), who ...”

“... of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition at that time, mostly crumbling tenements, more than half of them without an inside bath and with a loo on the stairs.Just west of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the ...”