“... brews quietly up within its own bowels,’ Huxley wrote, ‘few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing which is technically known as “pleasure”.’ Huxley recoiled from America’s embrace of manufactured pleasure. He believed that ...”

“... MacIntyre), or Marxist critics of liberal modernity (Theodor Adorno) – are more condemnatory. The second conception is typically held by historians, who have largely abandoned grand narratives of the Enlightenment. As they see it, the evidence is too complicated, and the totalising approach conflates political and intellectual ...”

“... Yevtushenko’s face, more cadaverous by the year, stares morosely from the flap of Wild Berries. The camera has evidently caught him thinking of his native Taiga, the Siberian tundra which forms the idyllic background to the novel. In fact, the background of Wild Berries, which is not the best ordered of narratives, rather usurps the foreground, and for much of its length the novel reads like over-the-top Intourist travel literature, aimed at rehabilitating a region associated in the foreign mind (at least) with exile, sub-zero temperatures and days in the life of Soviet dissidents ...”

“... shining sea. Given the primitive state of transportation and communication in the early republic, Thomas Jefferson anticipated that two or more independent nations would eventually come into being, though he hoped they would live in peace, unlike the countries of Europe. One political leader who apparently tried to act on ...”

“... four parallel texts on the page (edited from the lucubrations of the great and good Sir Thomas Urquhart, a fellow Scottish patriot and eccentric genius), prints the vowels and consonants of a passage on separate pages, and interrupts the text with blank sections (where the manuscript was supposedly nibbled by mice). Not all of Gray’s literary ...”

“... enough). The building is beautifully described by Bellow in Seize the Day. The Chelsea makes many more star appearances, but it’s the denizens of the place, their celebrity and sheer numbers – from Mark Twain through several generations of artists, cranks and druggies, to Sid Vicious – that warrant its reputation. Almost no one on the New York arts ...”

“... his subject’s significance as an archetype: he presents a shining vessel of high femininity, no more than lightly dusted with accidents of character. ‘Prudence (Minerva) Overthrowing Ignorance (or Sedition)’ (c.1632-33) Pieter Bruegel, Rubens’s predecessor as painter-philosopher in Antwerp, is acknowledged several times in the Royal Academy’s ...”

“... as a Catholic schoolboy. Morris was Jewish, one of the first Jews I had ever met, making it even more embarrassing. Leavis, at this time, acknowledged Cambridge customs and proprieties by defying them. He wore a gown when the situation required it, but with shirt open, collar up, and no tie, and with the gown most of the time bundled over his arm. When he ...”

“... much ingenuity in planning as office life. Imagining what it would be like to live in a house is more intriguing than imagining how it would feel to work in a bank, and amateurs have as much right as anyone to an opinion.The question that always arises is whether the architect has to serve the client’s wishes or should plan for a better way of ...”

“... revealed that there were other ways of writing verse than those prescribed either by the Dylan Thomas school of apocalyptic word-chimers, or by the Movement, in whose manifestos he detected – rightly, I think – a fatal ‘whiff of little Englandism’. So, after beginning unsteadily, with early poems that had not quite assimilated the influences of ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were ...”

“... taxes can be cut while military spending is piled high, and those deficits – hey, who cares any more? Totemic fame has its price. Eponymous labels can be misleading. Economists who have never actually read any of the works of Keynes and Schumpeter nonetheless confidently invoke their names in identifying stylised concepts; and it is pointless to complain ...”

“... name. The ritual of identification has rules. For example, no animal or plant has been allowed more than one scientific name since Linnaeus established the system of applying first a generic and then a specific name in his Systema Naturae two and a half centuries ago. This form of shorthand was a blessing, replacing as it did Latin descriptions that were ...”

“... What a good subject, or at least successful subject, consists in, according to the machine, is more so. The computer looks for subjects by looking for clusters of nouns – if kitten, furball, whiskers and paws appear then some of the book is about cats – and calculating how much space the clusters take up. In a sample of 5000 novels 0.001 per cent of ...”

“... He would sit there in his old raincoat and brown trilby, rocking slightly as he wove his ever more exuberant fantasies, on which, I have to admit, I looked less admiringly then than I do in retrospect. I had the spot in the show immediately following Peter’s monologue, which was scheduled to last five minutes or so but would often last for fifteen, when ...”