“... accrued nonetheless. Geologists have understood since the 17th century that sedimentary layers of rock and soil mark the passage of time, the youngest layers at the top, the oldest at the bottom, and that sometimes geological forces will push up a slice of the world that contains several aeons’ worth of fossil-rich strata, which we can read like the lines ...”

“... to be free of consequences only for those at the top of the social pile – kings, aristocrats, rock stars (‘We piss anywhere, man,’ as the monarchical Mick Jagger once said). The world of the Iliad is not just one of vehement passions but one of death – continual, and described in horrible detail. This is why Norbert Elias saw the pacification and ...”

“... Nastassia Kinski as their wives. For Wenders, a long-time lover of the Western and of American rock music, it was, as he has since told the French magazine Positif, the closing of a circle, the completion of his preoccupation with the USA. The last piece in his (embarrassingly titled) Emotion Pictures is a long, troubled free-verse meditation on ‘The ...”

“... factory somewhere downstate, Clinton is confronted by a host of questions about his Little Rock love-nest. He looks like a dog being washed. Since I don’t care about Flowers, I attempt to change the subject – never an easy thing to do at a pack-job press conference. I want to know about the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was a black ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... magical castle jail, with its high turrets and gothic battlements’. ‘There is a story,’ Paul Rock writes in Reconstructing a Women’s Prison (1996), ‘that its façade [was intended] … to mollify suburban neighbours unhappy about the construction of a prison in the midst of their new-built homes.’ When an execution took place, crowds would gather ...”

“... as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young Michelangelo to the 12th Olympic ...”

“... Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film Dreamchild, the cinematic meditation on the life of the real Alice directed by Gavin Millar and scripted by Dennis Potter, Henson was the obvious choice to supply the puppets ...”

“... that this is an ‘occupational hazard’ – in the sense, I imagine, that singers in heavy metal rock bands are prone to deafness, or boxers to brain damage. But in both these cases – the actor who cowered in his dressing-room, and the vertiginous Olivier – the stage fright was a symptom of a private disorder quite unconnected with the business of ...”

“... Picabia a particular way of layered picturing, which was soon appropriated by the Americans David Salle and Julian Schnabel. At its best this hallucinatory mélange suggests not a dream space so much as a media overload, a kind of Surrealism without an unconscious in which the subject, no longer home, is dispersed among images in the world at large. At ...”

“... personal essays, not far from the work of the so-called ‘ultra-talk’ poets (Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby) whose chatty, digressive work filled many magazines in the 1990s. Perillo told me at a recent reading that her favourite contemporary poet was C.K. Williams, whose famously long-lined, sometimes violent poems were as committed as she is to ...”

“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... printed books in a plum-coloured binding. I take down a volume, and read on the spine the name ‘David Copperfield’; underneath, in slightly smaller letters, is another name, ‘Charles Dickens’. I open the book, and find the same combination repeated on the title page. I have heard of Dickens, and conclude that what I am holding is a novel written by ...”

“... high polls at Rochdale and he tells us that if he had agreed to fight Edinburgh Central he had David Steel’s ‘generous’ promise that, if he lost, he would be recommended for the Lords. As a communicator he has met or interviewed everybody and travelled everywhere; and he has sufficient faith in television as a universal educator to say that, in this ...”

“... Sea and Summer is that it is a metaphoric reflection of Victorian society. It has the same plot as David Copperfield. When it starts, young Francis Conway is the child of a pretty young mother and an ineffective but still employed father. However, Dad immediately loses his job and commits suicide rather than descend from the suburbs to the tower-blocks of the ...”