“... sat on the terrace one night, Shelleygrasped me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet … I demanded of him if he were in pain – but he only answered by saying: ‘There it is again! There!’ … He saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child rise from the sea, and clap its hands as in ...”

“... respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title. The first article is signed by her natural name, Cicily Fairfield: she was so young that she had not yet yielded to whatever weakness it ...”

“... interests discovered that no one was pushing back all that hard. Despite Democratic control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, 1978 saw the defeat of attempts to introduce progressive tax reform and to improve the legal position of trade unions. Instead, legislation was passed that reduced the tax burden on corporations and increased the burden on ...”

“... was deployed to argue that there were hierarchies of freedom: some kinds of people – basically, white ones (though East Asians were sometimes allowed a look-in) – were better suited to it than others. The argument went that we can live free and prosper so long as we stick to doing business with our own kind. When we start bending over backwards to let all ...”

“... was only the opening shot, and whether he runs again or does or does not eventually win the White House, he has unleashed a force in American politics that cannot be bridled.’ Buchanan’s significance, Francis concluded, was cultural as much as political, the beginning of a quasi-Gramscian ‘long march’ to restore American identity. In ...”

“... sequence, but is Potemkin as a whole a great film? Again, there’s a sublime scene with the great white whale in Huston’s Moby Dick but the film is certainly not a great film. Above all, there are fabulous song-and-dance numbers in any number of musicals, but how many musicals are great films? Or, speaking of moments, the killing of Jack Palance by Alan ...”

“... than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican Party which shelters the white supremacists and religious bigots. Gingrich didn’t really hate the Sixties. But for tactical reasons, he needs the people who did. Much of this book is taken up with a restatement of the Contract with America on which the GOP took both Houses in ...”

“... Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now it’s a special-interest item, available on prescription – like Southern Gothic vampirism, Uzi and crack Brixton scorchers, cyberpunk. Like the rest of genre fiction it is dealt with in compendium ...”

“... qu’instable’. He is describing homosexuals, whom he calls ‘inverts’, and to Edmund White’s analysis of this passage in The Proust Project – White sees Proust’s writing on homosexuality as both ‘venomous’ in certain of its assumptions and productive in the sheer array of its contradictions – we ...”

“... loved, likewise Trainspotting. Almost anything scatological had great appeal. He also enjoyed the Richard Yates books I shared with him. When I was ill at one point I read through all of Derek Raymond, whom I recommend to anyone with a stubborn bacterial infection. ‘Oh, yes,’ Thom said, ‘he’s wonderful, isn’t he.’ Sometimes we came on an author ...”

“... the whole interwar period, looks wonderfully haughty and disdainful in his black topper. Sir Richard Hopkins, who headed the Treasury team for most practical purposes in the 1930s before belatedly becoming permanent secretary himself, is caught looking obliquely, intently, thoughtfully – not a man to be underestimated – while his close colleague Sir ...”

“... we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So ...”

“... are the Wrong Notebooks. The same could be said of the Diaries of Emma published in facsimile by Richard Taylor, and containing memoranda of four holidays the Hardys took abroad, starting with their honeymoon. When Emma died in 1912 Hardy read not only the haunting Some Recollections describing her childhood and the Cornish romance with her husband but what ...”

“... Company struck again. This time the book was called Innovation and written by a director called Richard Foster. With ‘change’ all around them, successful companies need to know more about innovation and the problem of limits. Here, then, is the story of the S-curve, the theory of the Attacker’s Advantage, and a necessary correction of Peters and ...”

“... itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places. Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of ...”