“... setting. In Yorkshire he lived in a draughty Victorian building, perched high above the desolate black-red streets of Halifax, among the grimmest scoria of the Industrial Revolution. In Worcestershire his home was a Georgian mansion in rolling countryside, once a bishop’s manor. The move allowed Williams, who remembered Thompson’s apostrophe, a sly jest ...”

“... by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a potent popular ...”

“... would be ‘A Thousand Years of English Expansion’ were coldly received). ‘Britishness,’ Linda Colley has written, ‘was superimposed over an array of internal differences’ in response to contact (and conflict) with the other – i.e. with Catholic and then republican France. In other words, Britishness can exist when the nations of the UK face a ...”

“... friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of particular historical conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic ...”

“... Sisyphus, I cried for a creature I had never really known. But the arrival last summer of Goose, a black Labrador, means that I too now know what it is to be the object of an animal’s love, and to love her in turn, as I tell her several times a day. She lies next to me as I write, her paws tucked neatly under her otter-smooth head, her body pressed against ...”

“... Hemingway’s own reality than the author could bear. ‘It has become a critical commonplace,’ Linda Patterson Miller writes in her foreword to the present volume, ‘that his wounding as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in World War One scarred him psychologically and led him to create emotionally damaged heroes attempting to live in a troubled ...”

“... lambasted the British government for its petty treatment of him there. In the words of the Black Dwarf, Britain spent vast sums ‘to torture one man abroad, while tens of thousands are starving at home to furnish the expense’. At first glance, the strain of British admiration for Napoleon seems the principal novelty of Semmel’s book. His broader ...”

“... will ultimately furnish the table of a fundraiser for the politician and former wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, then running for Senate and now a member of Trump’s cabinet. But Vuong resists pessimism as much as he claims to resist catharsis. He wants to show that bonds between unlikely people are made in situations of labour (‘Can camaraderie … be ...”

“... The performance was held in a church and it was impossible, since I was then obsessed with the black-metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, not to imagine the place burning down. I could hear the crackling: floors, ceiling, walls. The Elvis impersonator’s Norwegian tumbled over me, interspersed with uh-huh-huhs, which represented the exact ...”

“... love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not exactly. Barthes on the ...”

“... there is a depiction of a failing partnership in La Femme gelée (translated as A Frozen Woman by Linda Coverdale in 1995), the last novel she wrote, which was published in 1981 and is dedicated to Philippe. She began to write non-fiction with the book about her father in 1983, then wrote one about her mother, Une femme, in 1988 (translated as A Woman’s ...”

“... the two. At Arizona State University, a campus police officer was recorded violently arresting a black woman faculty member, Professor Ersula Ore, who had refused to show her ID on the street. In November 2011, at the time of Occupy, police pepper-sprayed students as they protested silently against higher tuition fees at UC Davis. A subsequent ...”

“... Shaw’s Ragnarok (1926), in which the French attack London with gas and fire-bombs, while their black African allies – fictional relations of those that had caused such resentment in Germany when France occupied the Ruhr – wait in the countryside to rape and slaughter the fleeing Londoners. In Neil Bell’s Valiant Clay (1934), the entire world is lost ...”

“... in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one afternoon as the New York sun began to dip. One of the reasons the resulting image was ...”

“... on the disease through saliva during his final acting job in Dynasty, which required him to kiss Linda Evans. The producers couldn’t understand why he only wanted to give her a tiny peck rather than the passionate embrace the script called for. After his death in October 1985, aged 59, Taylor planned Hudson’s memorial service and sent a red rose to each ...”