“... Frances Yates, Rykwert discusses the interest in architecture shown by the Elizabethan magus John Dec and the possible connection between Dee and Inigo Jones. So far, so good: Perrault had not written yet. But it turns out – another exciting discovery – that Sir Christopher Wren, despite his admiration for Perrault’s writings, was also interested ...”

“... North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a subject of which Wilson knew little and practised less. De Quincey lived in or near Edinburgh for over ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... from these events and from the title of the sequence, that Westeros is heading for a white walker v. dragon stand-off, at some exciting juncture a couple of fat novels away. So the reader knows that magic is real, but the people of Westeros think that it isn’t; with one big exception, and it is this exception that is, I think, the second structural ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... irresistibly lucid prose: it seems as if the decisive move was made before he put pen to paper. John Austin borrowed a phrase from Aristotle’s Poetics to describe this effect: ‘events outside the tragedy’. If we want to get off this stage, how are we to do it? The ladder seems to have been kicked away. The parallel argument current today hustles us ...”

“... a Naval official for three. This fraud is said to have involved £20 million in present terms. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, cleared of its treasures, was the scene of a ramp in clothing coupons, and a similar one was operated in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. In less imposing premises, underground printers turned from pornography and bogus race ...”

“... They are reducible, he said, ‘to a very few general types’: the chain-rattler; the ghostly walker or horseman; the forlorn-looking child; the pale doppelgänger; the wronged maid; the spirit of an evil ancestor whose painting hangs in a gloomy panelled hall; the friend or relative who is dying far away. Dickens was discussing tales told around the fire ...”

“... as imagined by white man) doesn’t have. Griffin’s essence is his schizophrenia: poet and thug, walker and static brooder, white man in black skin. This is no Al Jolson performance calculated to charm, nor a vulgar, rose-between-teeth travesty like Olivier’s Othello. There is nothing flashy about it. There’s no twist in the tail as there is in Charles ...”

“... 1929, two sets of biographers forced him to concede that he had lied. Andrew Gowers and Tony Walker, in Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution (1990), found Cairo University records giving Arafat’s birthplace as Cairo. Janet and John Wallach, who wrote Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder ...”

“... the moon, somehow, some way, when I married him. Knowing this hasn’t changed my life.’ Grace Walker, who was married to another Nasa astronaut, Joe Walker, said of Armstrong that ‘he was very tight emotionally. But the whole attraction to those men, outside of their being good-looking and daring, was that they were ...”

“... of interest to literate businessmen. Sent on assignment to Alabama in 1936, with the photographer Walker Evans, to do an article on tenant farmers, he returned with unorganised pages and sections of finished prose, prose-in-the-rough, poetry, extended captions and descriptions, none of them reducible to an article in Fortune. Agee’s manuscript kept soaking ...”

“... 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as ...”

“... But no culture matches Catholic and Orthodox Christianity for its fascination with what Caroline Walker Bynum calls ‘holy matter’. In Bynum’s account, relics of the saints bear witness to the central paradox of Christian materiality. If the changeless God could become incarnate in corruptible matter, then matter itself must be capable of the holy. Yet ...”

“... bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both ...”