“... James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter College hall in January 1954. The hall was bitter cold but both ...”

“... genuine; Dworkin tells us this, too. Therefore ... The Nazis looked to youth for redemption; Perry Anderson looks to youth for redemption. Therefore ... The Stalinist György Lukacs despised his Habsburgian inheritance; so did Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos. Therefore ... Marxists believe that the nature of a society is determined by its economic ...”

“... more tolerant, on men with pony-tails or long, curly hair. There is no interest, for example, in David Bowie’s floral dress or Boy George’s Body Map kilt or the many other examples of drag or quasi-drag one might think of. Essential modernity, in the form of the neoclassical male silhouette, is here to stay. The modern suit provides us all with ‘a ...”

“... a kind of reality consistent with its ambitions, in what might – borrowing from Benedict Anderson – be thought of as its ‘Imagined Territories’. Israel’s insistence on building in the Occupied Territories forced it to take into account the existence of Palestinian villages and roads but as Weizman shows, Israeli ‘architects’ had then to ...”

“... become a swing state, in the year it mattered most, was something I had not foreseen.It was after Anderson Cooper’s comment about Donald Trump being ‘an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun’ that I began to feel it in my body. ‘Did you just feel it?’ I texted a friend. ‘Almost like a thaw.’ Like my heart slumped sideways in my ...”

“... Clinton 18 times (compared to 51 interruptions in the first debate). His reply to the moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about his videotaped boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, which had been released a few days earlier, was: ‘But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of Isis … And we should get on to ...”

“... British Vogue’s official history begins not with Todd, or her temporary replacement, Miss Anderson, but with the wonderfully named Elspeth Champcommunal, who took over in time for the 1916 Christmas edition, informing readers that ‘the Parisienne’s day is not complete unless she wears the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more ...”

“... think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls ‘the smart state’. Smart to Mr Cameron seems to mean doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise. Smart as in smart alec, smart of the smart ...”

“... environment. Our ‘pleasure cycles’ are now tied to the web, the literary critic Sam Anderson claimed in a 2009 cover story in New York magazine, ‘In Defense of Distraction’. ‘It’s too late,’ he declared, ‘to just retreat to a quieter time.’ This sort of ‘outré posturing’ by intellectuals rankles with Carr since, he thinks, it ...”

“... otherness of insects, their fast-burn and utterly alien sense of time. The quotation from Enrique Anderson Imbert at the start of Eye of the Cricket clarifies the quest: ‘Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in the eyes of the cricket.’ Anxiety: that’s the tool with ...”

“... Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson of the Dial; to Margaret Anderson of the Little Review. Two hefty books collected his courtship letters to Dorothy Shakespear, and those written to her some thirty years later from the Disciplinary Training Centre outside Pisa, where he was incarcerated after surrendering to US forces in ...”

“... from Ballymurphy. In his essay (in Zones of Engagement) on Fukuyama’s The End of History Perry Anderson has analysed the 20th-century genealogy of ‘this collective vision of a stalled, exhausted world, dominated by recursive mechanisms of bureaucracy and ubiquitous circuits of commodities, relieved only by the extravagances of a phantasmic imaginary ...”

“... to be the voice of restraint and consensus once more? A year or two ago, I was billed with Perry Anderson to give an evening to the not very influential New York Marxist School. We were to compare and contrast Reaganism and Thatcherism, both of which had been described as ‘revolutions’, and I drew the easy job of discussing the first. Reaganism, already ...”

“... decline have been a cottage industry in Britain since the 1950s. The thesis advanced by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in the 1960s and 1970s was that Britain modernised too early and not enough, never experiencing a proper ‘bourgeois revolution’ (along the lines of 1789) or developing a fully self-conscious or revolutionary proletariat. Britain’s ...”

“... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...”