“... of the difficulty of translating that experience into text. The book’s three sections unfold more like a dialectical argument than a fictional narrative. If there is a story here, it’s about the limits of language.Appropriately, Goetz begins with an ellipsis (the rapid d-d-d of a drum machine firing at 150 beats per minute):… and came up to me in ...”

“... of an oddity. Unlike the other masterpiece hunters of the late 19th century, Huntington was more of a taxonomer, acquiring hundreds of thousands of objects to create ‘a broad outline without duplication’ of Spanish and Hispanic art and culture. He wanted, as he put it, to ‘capture the soul of Spain in a museum’ and, in May 1904, he founded the ...”

“... publication of Pynchon’s immense Gravity’s Rainbow, during which time exegesis has continued more or less unabated. It is accompanied by tireless speculation as to what the author could be up to next, where he was, indeed who he was. Compared with Pynchon, J.D. Salinger is a publicity-hunter. One daring scholarly conjecture, that these authors are one ...”

“... FAS, which must make any classicist look for NEFAS. It is doubtful whether any of these have done more than waste a little more public money. When these remedies fail, we get scapegoating, as illustrated by John Major’s recent assault on ‘outmoded politically correct ways of teaching’ and get quantification, in the ...”

“... curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced collection of colour reproductions of Wilson’s painting there will ever be in book form, accompanied by a ...”

“... feeling ran high. He swore loudly and often, devised his own peculiar costume (nautical, more or less), and wasn’t too careful about personal hygiene. No one thought he was a gentleman, a fact that didn’t trouble him in the least. His erratic behaviour eventually turned into insanity, probably resulting from syphilis caught during his rowdy years ...”

“... finished reading these two biographies I was very bored indeed. Almost everyone I know has had a more interesting life than Gibran; even I am having a more interesting life than he had. The biographers have done their best but I should guess that they, too, have had more interesting ...”

“... Time has a way​ of turning radicals into authorities. Thomas Aquinas was provocative during his lifetime because he sought to ground Christian theology in Aristotelian philosophy. Marx was exiled, Socrates poisoned. Moses Maimonides, known in the Jewish tradition by the honorific ‘Rambam’ (for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, his real name), was celebrated centuries after his death as a towering figure in both philosophy and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure ...”

“... composer’s visits to London between 1958 and 1965, occupy over half the book. Although there are more sketches than seems necessary, they capture marvellously the hunched, almost repressed posture characteristic of the composer (even as a younger man), and thus lend support to some of Keller’s psychological hypotheses. This physical attitude is all the ...”

“... to that history. Still, if these pictures do seduce, they may also impel the smitten to discover more about the object of desire. For the intellectually curious the footnotes are a more than adequate bibliography. Mr Platt, I believe, claims far too much. ‘Life-styles,’ he says in his Preface, are my subject, and ...”

“... Few presences were more imposing in postwar poetry than that of T.S. Eliot, but from his eminence as the Pope of Russell Square, Eliot has now shrunk to something more like a holy ghost. Pound’s right-wing unpleasantness, because so deranged, seems somehow more forgivable, to the huddled ranks of Poundians at least ...”

“... historian, journalist, MP and PM, drinking, smoking, eating and tirelessly talking his way through more than fifty years of politics, statecraft and war. Yet these two supreme egotists became as close friends as their personalities permitted, and it may be argued that anyone who is thankful that Britain ended the Second World War on the winning side should ...”

“... they dart under canopies of fallen leaves. Fish sleep with their eyes open: not our kind of sleep, more like our kind of daydream. Awake but not awake, just like me; living to eat and conserve energy, just like me; devoid of answers, just like me; comfortable in their doom, just like me. These days goldfish are my homies.Fishing is an occasion for hope. In my ...”

“... There were​ more than a million women in early 16th-century England, yet we remain obsessively interested in the life and death of just one. The usual, if sensational, explanation is that Anne Boleyn was a woman of unconventional but irresistible charm, with exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes ...”

“... the greatest miseries to which human nature is liable.’ Though their tones could hardly differ more, Pilkington and Orrery had the same idea: what made Swift a satirist was what made him, eventually, go out of his mind. It is as if being him were intolerable. Biographers have been drawn to Swift by this sense that there must have been something singular ...”