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“... was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a ...”

“... of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in ...”

“... Warhol wasn’t interested in the play, but he did want to cast Solanas in an erotic film, I, a Man. On the day she shot Warhol, Solanas rode the six floors with her victim in the elevator up to his office. ‘Solanas’s bullets,’ the Times reported, ‘punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him ...”

“... 1960s pop-rock before its larky brashness got lost in earnest philosophising. I see the young Ray Davies – an ambiguous girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much ...”

“... souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval, But Shadwell’s genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day. Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye, And seems designed for thoughtless majesty: Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain, And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. On the one hand, the crescendo of ...”

“... many ways sharply characterised, with a formidable resource of observed contemporaneity – Media Man in motion. Yet, for all his TV hair-do’s, he, too, has an ancestry like that of Rhiannon and Malcolm; he is surely descended from the incorrigible Patrick of the earlier book who lamentably rapes the gentle Jenny instead of marrying her the first time ...”

“... first and last time anyone took over herself.’ Lilacs and dizziness, the sweeping element of a man. ‘Andado’ climaxes not with a defloration, but with what directly precedes it: They heard the river before they saw it, and then the clatter of Lautaro’s hooves on the wooden bridge. His ghastly shriek as the bridge gave way. They were both thrown from ...”

“... sort of political thought which sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a new kind of human being. Simultaneously, the Romantic poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture ...”

“... peasants’ – Mencken wrote approvingly in 1919 – and drew from it ‘the eternal tragedy of man’. Reviewing her early novels in the Nation, Carl Van Doren praised both her democratic outlook and ‘elemental’ vision of human suffering. ‘Passion blows through her chosen characters,’ he enthused, ‘like a free, wholesome, if devastating ...”

“... This ancient sense of philosophy as having an existential telos retains some power even today. Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein from 1990 is philosophically illuminating precisely because its way of presenting Wittgenstein’s thinking as part of a broader account of his life brings out the ethical spirit that informed both, and so casts valuable ...”

“... of nowhere and out of context the lines from Henry V, ‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man/As modest stillness and humility’, and I do think that most of the time he behaved as if he believed this, but there were some concerns about which he could be pushy with a persistence devoid of all shame. In the case of his march he got his rewards. After ...”

“... no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an omnibus review of four books by Northrop Frye. ‘Notes on “Camp”’ transmits on an entirely different frequency, its ...”

“... car reverses dramatically up the street, screeches to a halt beside the van and a burly young man jumps out and gives the van a terrific shaking. Assuming (hoping, probably) he would have driven off by the time I get outside, I find he’s still there, and ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing. His response is quite mild. ‘What’s up with you ...”

“... one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office. Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency ...”

“... Kennedy, where the race to the moon made orbital adventures look out of date. The Zooms and Sky-Ray Lollies that the rocketmen bought their children on August afternoons in suburbia referred to archetypal rockets, and therefore to the rockets of the US. The Eagle folded, after faithfully publishing a double-page spread about Black Arrow in January ...”