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“... does not tell us – what needs the whole book for an answer – is how that illness should be judged. Is it just a flaw within Birkin, or does the infection come from without, from a pestilent civilisation? Is Birkin spiteful and morbid, like a Dostoevskian hero; or is he a tunnel canary, warning a complacent world that a poisonous element is spreading ...”

“... in the Index, next to Mailer’s name. A similar tactic might happily have been ventured by the publishers of Philip Larkin’s Letters: the book’s back pages are going to be well-thumbed. ‘Hi, Craig,’ see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, ...”

“... off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked ...”

“... and artists from the start (Dryden moved to Gerrard Street in 1687 while still poet laureate), and by the mid-18th century thronged with coffee houses and taverns. A blue plaque commemorates Dryden, but on the wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the ...”

“... from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The existence of violent, sadistic and resourceful criminals is ...”

“... We​ had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the poet’s birthplace. Oppen (b. 1908) had recently broken a long silence and become a poet of his time – the 1960s and 1970s – however much he may have insisted, as he did in the same poem, that he was ‘of the Thirties ...”

“... Douglass wrote, had been ‘so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes’. And yet the only pieces of advice adult slaves would give him were: don’t look up in the presence of your overseer and avert your gaze from the suffering of others.When he was eight Douglass was sent to Baltimore, to another branch of ...”

“... in 1943, deaf, unable to use language, institutionalised for much of her life, and described by her psychiatric and artistic mentors as someone who had no concept of sculpture, she was not consciously engaged in the creation of art, and could not possibly have a notion of its form. What can be the relation of this ...”

“... On 9 February, an exhibition of remarkable new photographs by Josef Hoflehner opens at the Atlas Gallery in London. The pictures show interiors of the base camp huts built and lived in between 1901 and 1912 by Scott’s and Shackleton’s polar expeditions. The huts and their contents have been preserved intact, and the photographs show intensely close details of things long left behind: ragged shirts and socks hanging up on lines, wooden cases forming a wall, a jar of fruit salts, bottled redcurrants and gooseberries, tins of dried onions and parsnips, reams of unused paper on a shelf, a small open book with curled pages next to a cut end of rope, a view of the main dining-table and chairs that echoes the famous picture of the same table with Scott and his men sitting around it celebrating Christmas ...”

“... to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak for England!’ (In Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On this becomes ‘Speak for England, Arthur,’ but witnesses all say there were three words, not ...”

“... If ..., Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 fable of public school rebellion, was at a screening organised by Winchester College’s film society. One of the documentaries Anderson made in the early 1950s was called Wakefield Express, about the local newspaper which commissioned it. The film derives its structure from the production schedule of the Express, beginning ...”

“... Everyone knows that the great accountancy houses, ‘the Big Six’, as they used to be called, wield the most astonishing power in the business world and the economy. Not so many know how much power they wield over the Government. The story of Arthur Andersen, and its burgeoning power, is especially interesting. Arthur Andersen is a proud survivor of the stampede of top accountancy firms to sue each other for alleged negligence in auditing and handling the accounts of clients who had gone bust in the recession of the early 1990s ...”

“... pictures that lock the story in our minds.’ The depiction of other people’s undoing, usually by violence, is part of this ideology, a component of ‘what a society chooses to think about’, yet Sontag believes it might transcend stipulation and generate a proper moral reflection on the nature of ‘war and other infamies’; or, better still, a desire ...”

“... so, too, is the story about the void. But the underlying materialist intuition continues to be plausible; everything is the same sort of stuff as familiar, ontologically untendentious objects like rivers, rocks and stars. The whole world is that sort of stuff in its myriad configurations. So construed, materialism is a sound bet on a research ...”

“... days’ observations of the Jovian satellites as he could without missing the deadline imposed by the most important opportunity for intellectual exchange in early modern Europe, the Frankfurt Book Fair. The pamphlet gestured to the possibility of using the satellites as a precise celestial clock, but relied on medieval merchant time to deliver its ...”