“... likely to come up with. But a sceptic might wonder whether the officials didn’t like what they read. A sense of the report’s possible substance may be gleaned from the contributions made by its authors to recently published studies. In Audit Cultures, edited by Marilyn Strathern,1 McDonald writes very interestingly about the conflicting cultures of ...”

“... call ‘schtupping’. By the mid-1970s McQueen was so bored of movies that he charged $50,000 to read a script and gave up acting altogether for two years.Reading between the lines – as you have to do in Christopher Sandford’s clumsy, ill-written McQueen: The Biography – it is clear that there was never anything very laid-back about McQueen, an actor ...”

“... tension between Syria’s new Baath regime and other players. It is more than surprising to read what an Israeli diplomat based in London wrote in December 1966: I was struck by the way the British ambassador to Israel [Michael Hadow] practically encouraged us openly to strike against the Syrians . . . To my knowledge, Hadow moved among various ...”

“... the contemporary poetry of the translation language, the context in which the translation will be read. On the evidence here, Alter seems to know very little about the last hundred years of English-language poetry. He is partial to Victorian language, perhaps in the belief that it is more ‘poetic’. The result is that, at times, he sounds more dated than ...”

“... of seasonal celebration, and spurred new ones too. In England the calendar of feasts came to read like a folk litany: Plough Monday, Maundy Thursday, Hocktide, May Day, Whitsun, Lammas. A well-established artistic tradition matched each season to its labours; an oil-painted ‘Calendar Dial’ c.1500 from the Low Countries organises them by month ...”

“... the very figure of a divided subject. Max Ernst, the most traumatophilic of Surrealists, read Freud in the original German and related the layering of his early collages to the working over of primal fantasies and other traumatic scenes. These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the ...”

“... struggles, but also fought for Black civil rights, women’s equality and decolonisation. As Richard Wright wrote, ‘there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.’After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern directive t0 national communist parties to adopt ...”

“... the demand for embodied evil. I’m squeamish too, and I found parts of Murderland difficult to read. But the book’s impressively varied perspectives, which shift between geology, history, politics, literature and neurology, give these poisoned, poisonous figures an unexpected breadth of implication. It starts out as psychogeography (pun ...”

“... himself called ‘Tambo’, both terms drawn from blackface minstrelsy) – encourages us to read the poems as what Vendler calls Freudian cartoons. The instinct to deface and ridicule (‘Rilke was a jerk’), to shame and insult (as in the animus directed at Christine Keeler, who is reviled twice as a ‘whore’ in a poem about the Profumo affair), to ...”

“... The​ teenager was born, it’s sometimes said, in America in the mid-1950s, when Little Richard released ‘Tutti Frutti’ and Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Thirty years later, the Thatcher government made a less exuberant contribution to the way the transition to adulthood is imagined. A new type of policy problem had come to light in the form of the working-age youth who was not in work, education or training, and risked getting stuck in that situation ...”

“... of the star alumni of Caesar’s comic academy, said. ‘When I say “urbane”, between us we read every book … saw every movie … saw every play on Broadway. You could make jokes about Kafka.’ (How did that go, I wonder?)‘Maybe the most important thing I did on the show was to sit with and preside over that group of geniuses,’ Caesar wrote in ...”

“... photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement ...”

“... appeared in a satirical magazine showing him in short pants next to his father. The caption read: ‘I am told, Papa, that the son of a genius is never a genius himself. Therefore, you can’t be a genius!’ Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?’ When The Magic Mountain ...”

“... are, in Hardy’s phrase, ‘selves unseeing’. Setting the poem eighty years after Schubert, Richard Strauss overrode these delicacies of sentiment in favour of an outpouring of ecstatic love (the young man’s), pulsing with sensuality and the rush of the blood. His setting – Fragonard to Schubert’s Watteau – scaled up the expressive range to the ...”