“... the technique of off-road desert driving, for example, and on how the Science Fiction deserts of Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ray Bradbury and Star Wars borrow form and colour from the American South-West. Accounts of Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert camps and Paolo Soleri’s desert dream-town (a tiny fragment of which is already ...”

“... Peter Handke​ began his career insulting his audience, and it long seemed that he would end it with his audience insulting him. In Insulting the Audience (1966), the play that brought him fame at the age of 23, he called the audience ‘dirty Jews’, ‘Nazi pigs’ and many things besides. Thirty years later, after he took up the cause of Serbian independence, condemned Nato intervention in the former Yugoslavia, compared the Serbs to Jews under the Third Reich, doubted the authenticity of reports of massacres in Srebrenica and elsewhere, received various honours from the Serbian government, and gave a eulogy before a crowd of 20,000 at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral, the vector of insult was mightily reversed ...”

“... duplicitous. Writing a self-confessed ‘fan letter’ to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired ...”

“... meditation and even been given a mantra is understandable because it was done to please Frank Grimes, whom he loved, but that he not only experimented with but appears to have relied on the I Ching seems unlike the man I knew. Lambert reveals that at Oxford he himself had a fling with Peter Brook whom I had ...”

“... was explicitly raising the concerns of his own constituents, and in their idiom as much as his. As Frank Field puts it, with his own experience as a Labour MP – writing from a sympathetic stance but in some wonderment – ‘he must have appreciated its likely impact.’ In a long and revealing interview at the end of the book, Powell’s widow, Pamela, is ...”

“... wages was accompanied by the emergence of a new, more left-wing trade-union leadership of which Frank Cousins was the champion. 1961 brought the Selwyn Lloyd ‘pay pause’ (and in its wake the return to planning, or ‘Macmillan Socialism’), and the ‘trade-union problem’ in its modern form can usefully be dated from then. Sir Denis puts his finger ...”

“... Frank Kermode observed in a recent article that critics are always being needed to rediscover work that, for whatever reason, has gone silent. Good literature is more silent than one might suppose: it waits mutely on the shelves, it cannot attract attention to itself, and in the conditions of our own or any other time it could wait till judgment day without being found and proclaimed ...”

“... ruin and general beastliness, not sure why good old Bob Mellish was being so rude to nice young Peter Tatchell. The vicious graffiti about Tatchell were gleefully reported: not so the more libellous graffiti about Mellish. None of this applies to Darlington. Here the Labour Movement, left and right, finds it quite easy to remain united – though members ...”

“... in Sussex Gardens in 1963, infuriated the Commissioners by likening them to the slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman, Bartlett said, had made life difficult for a few hundred people, the Church Commissioners had done the same for a few thousand. Another whinger was the Rev. Adam Duff, vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Bishop’s Bridge ...”

“... Bacon as menacing as ever. He has not petered out, and even his critics admit his achievement. Peter Fuller who ‘turns away from Bacon’s work with a sense of disgust and relief’ also describes him as ‘a good painter, arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the war’. And greatness is, Bacon says, the only thing worth ...”

“... havoc in the Midlands, where Cadbury is based. Hence, no doubt, the anti-Kraft intervention by Peter Mandelson, who as former commissioner of trade at the EU knows how purely hypocritical it is to protest. Second, and more interestingly, there’s something about sweets and chocolates which taps deep into people’s psyches. Our feelings about them are ...”

“... the gallery has to offer. A stone circle by Richard Long; an early To the Studios painting by Frank Auerbach. It’s difficult to say what these might mean in a Chinese context.This internationalism is new in China, according to the fair’s director, the painter Zhou Tiehai. It seems to indicate an openness to liberal market values, if not to Western ...”

“... The first four books would normally be described as literary criticism, though they exhibit a considerable variety of interests, sociological, historical, theoretical; in Harold Bloom’s case ordinary language is defeated, for we need some such compound as cabbalistic-rhapsodic. None of them shows much interest in British writing, or the British literary scene, or in literary criticism as it is now practised and taught here ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... Oxford months. Young Banks has the virtues of a hero in an old-fashioned school story. Frank, sometimes impulsive, not bearing grudges, a good friend (but too long-suffering to be a good judge of character), physically strong, unsnobbish and cheerful. To such a man natural history, in its robust adolescence, had much to offer. Rarity did not then ...”