“... struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), which devoted a chapter to his formative adventures in the Caribbean and Central America together with his wife ...”

“... him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are ...”

“... fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin​ was on his honeymoon – he married late – when he first read Dr Zhivago. It was the evening of Saturday, 18 August 1956, and he had just made the short journey back to Moscow from the village of Peredelkino, where he had spent the day with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak’s dacha was part of a complex set up on Stalin’s orders in 1934 to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers ...”

“... name for curiosity? What if there are theoretical questions to be asked about models? What if you read the Frankfurt School and also crank through microfilm? This in fact is what both Bordwell and Perez do. What’s mildly worrying is not their practice but their rhetoric of disavowal, their willingness to sound like the intellectual philistines they are ...”

“... towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library ...”

“... the Tories: those papers’ readers were going to vote for them anyway, whereas the Sun was being read by a large number of people whose affinities had traditionally but unimpassionedly been with the Labour Party. Chippindale and Horrie quote Lord Blake on these voters: ‘fairly young, slightly inclined to Labour, largely belonging to the skilled working ...”

“... this picture has of late been injected with new life and massively disseminated by the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, whose veneer of shocking realism and occasional flights of pure fancy hardly conceal its basic reinscription of the romantic image. It was time for scholars to hit back, and Amadeus was cited by H.C. Robbins Landon as a main reason for ...”

“... close to unseating the Kaiser. Nancy Mitford said it was one of the very best novels she had ever read and Evelyn Waugh ‘saluted a new artist’. Proustian in its preoccupation with money and rank, it has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set: a world where the very rich, when they went to take the cure, travelled in a private railway carriage ...”

“... speak of homology among DNA sequences as easily as among tetrapod fore-limbs) that it is easy to read into Geoffroy’s claims an evolutionary meaning he did not intend. The homologies that he saw, or thought he saw, were as far as he was concerned, placed there by the Creator. It was the age of what would be called Transcendental Anatomy. The Darwinian ...”

“... that doubtless have more to do with my childhood than my professional integrity, I feel obliged to read every word of any book I review, but though I doggedly and probably neurotically followed Dr Cook through all her youthful adventures, I confess to skipping pages and pages devoted to the various horses she owned and her anguish at their individual ...”

“... teacher. Criticism and Ideology (1976), which begins with an attack on Williams, is perhaps best read as a belated result of the student revolution at what Althusserians call the ‘level of theory’. Literary criticism was now to be scuttled in favour of an anti-humanist ‘science of the text’ in which the production of art was dialectically reduced to ...”

“... for women’ versus ‘boats for women’. Enzensberger must have missed it, or we should have read all about it. The feminist dimension is not among the elements of Titanic mythography to which the poem devotes much attention. It is confined to a few bits of lurid bizarrerie: Three cheers for the Countess Rothes in her ...”

“... brutality of a relation brought into the open, unmentionable in that epoch of Brushwood Boys and Peter Pans. Jessie Chambers wrote her own version of events in a novel she called The Rathe Primrose (Milton’s ‘rathe primrose that forsaken dies’) which Frieda found touching and ‘lovable’, while even Lawrence said ‘it wasn’t bad’. This ‘faded ...”