“... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...”

“... become acquainted with shades and degrees of dark of which I was previously unaware, from pitch black to the bright light of the full moon, and acquainted, too, with the noises of the night, the barking of foxes, the hooting of owls, the cracking of the fire, the stirring of the sleeping dogs, the sound of rainfall (particularly loud on the roof of a ...”

“... who sought to molest him. He rode round town on a white pony, painted sometimes with purple and black spots, sometimes purple all over. Butchell was an empiric who specialised in curing anal fistulae without surgery or the use of caustics or poultices; he also claimed to be able to cure impotence in men and barrenness in women. He displayed the embalmed ...”

“... other ruling classes in modern times’. These were not welcome ideas in the time of Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. No less significant was Genovese’s prize-winning Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), a sophisticated, psychologically sensitive and comprehensive social history that remains a classic. Masters and slaves, he ...”

“... successful careers than the great majority of those who did. The idea spread across the Atlantic, Benjamin West being the first American artist to make the pilgrimage to Italy, sponsored by Philadelphian patrons. He spent three years there before going to England, where he decided to stay instead of returning to America. But artists did not go to Italy only ...”

“... streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the ...”

“... Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company as a chemical engineer; his business acumen was directed at the causes of fires. In his free time he studied under Sapir. Reporting later from ...”

“... 1564, are the words hic incepit pestis: ‘Here begins the plague.’ ‘God’s tokens’, the black or purplish spots that were a telltale sign of bubonic plague, had presumably been found on Gunne’s body. Over the previous six months, the vicar of Holy Trinity Church had registered a score of burials; in a town of just under 1500 inhabitants, that was ...”

“... two centuries later, and indeed Gordon Campbell comes clean in his appended essay. The Gothic or black-letter type of the original is thought to be too difficult to read easily, even for the sort of people who would enjoy such a volume. That has an unfortunate side effect common to any modern edition of the KJB which keeps the original convention of ...”

“... I wanted something bigger, broader, deeper, and I wanted to know about Marx and Hegel and Walter Benjamin – I had a crush on Benjamin, actually, as a result of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have ...”

“... century, this clarity belongs to the philosophers who identified the ‘poverty of experience’ (Benjamin), ‘deep boredom’ (Heidegger) and ‘experience of depersonalisation’ (Lévinas) that characterise modern life. The inner touch has been withdrawn; hence ‘the unfeeling faces and bodies that fill our screens, our books, and our newspapers with ...”

“... of Burke has a long history, going back at least as far as the 1830s and 1840s, when Benjamin Disraeli concocted lineages of authentic Toryism which he distinguished from mere conservatism. Disraeli’s hero was Viscount Bolingbroke, the leader of the Tories in the early 18th century, but he also found a place for Burke, notwithstanding the Whig ...”

“... unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory, the phantasmagoric? The famous tagline Walter Benjamin borrowed from Leopardi – ‘Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!’ – seems made for the world Ensor shows. ‘The Intrigue’ (1890) Look again at The Intrigue and Skeletons Fighting. What seems to me stupendous about them (and thoroughly ...”

“... make good on your debts, but also whether you were the kind of person likely to do so. It is as if Benjamin Franklin had anticipated this intensity of scrutiny when he wrote, in his ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’ in 1748: The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or nine at ...”

“... DeLillo, where again Walden and Thoreau feature, this time as inspiration for a novelist called Benjamin Sachs, whose dissatisfaction with writing fiction as a way of engaging with the world leads him, via Austerian chains of coincidence, to a campaign of symbolic terrorism as the ‘Phantom of Liberty’, blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty across ...”