“... Few aspects​ of academic labour are more despised than marking. This is one of its uses, since academics love to complain. But the university is not the safe space for complaint that it once was. Negativity, even ambivalence, is frowned on. Nothing less than complete enthusiasm will satisfy: you must at all times be thrilled to announce, excited to be part of, delighted to share ...”

“... series called Hungry, set during the Great Famine. There were protests outside its offices and more than 42,000 people signed a petition calling for the show to be dropped. At a heated debate on comedy and censorship at the London Irish Comedy Festival, members of the audience made their views on the matter clear. ‘Humour is an affront to the genocide ...”

“... writing which obviously had a private meaning for him.’I was struck by the naive pictures, but more so by the fact that Beegan had been a patient at Netherne Hospital in Coulsdon, where, in effect, I grew up. This is a slight exaggeration: Netherne was where my mother worked, and my grandparents worked before that, and where I spent a great deal of time ...”

“... power to silence competing perspectives and to impose a legitimacy seemingly grounded on nothing more than its own brute assertion. The effort to explain this striking authority has led to the proliferation within American legal academies of important and influential movements like critical legal studies and critical legal sociology. These movements ...”

“... How is sociological research supposed to decide whether this view ought to be superseded by a more indulgent one? When citing instances of commendable deceit Barnes sometimes confounds deceit with tact. Massage-parlour girls who offer sexual services to their customers but are reticent about this to their boyfriends are described as practising ...”

“... form a clear picture of Hindu cave temples or ancient Egyptian palaces, and to contrast them with more familiar Greek, Roman or Gothic buildings, all without getting up from their drawing-boards. Thomson was, by his own admission, captivated by this new literature. Indeed, he seemed to prefer pictures and descriptions of buildings to the real things, since ...”

“... frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary life of San Francisco. But much of his poetry has also been laden down with paradox and wit; it is ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon and Emrys Jones for Shakespeare. I’m sure he spent many hours in the Bodleian, but more on the rugby pitch. In Singing School he doesn’t mention his literary prizes, but he gives the scores of the rugby matches in which he played and quotes favourable reviews of his performances from newspapers of the day. Stallworthy has always been ...”

“... Leonie Kramer.’ A footnote tells us Professor Kramer is an ‘Australian academic’ – no more. Why she has been singled out for this swipe is unexplained. The reason, I suppose, is that Professor Kramer wrote an unsympathetic piece about Riders in the Chariot in Quadrant in 1973. It was a very schematised and somewhat tedious exercise – but so is ...”

“... Latin American novelists. How to compete with history? How to create characters richer, crazier, more imaginative? Vargas and I sought an answer by inviting a dozen Latin American authors to write a novella each – no more than fifty pages per capita – on their favourite national tyrant. The collective volume would be ...”

“... all its superlatives ... Under the waterfall he surprised me bathing and gave me what I could no more refuse than the earth can refuse the rain.’ Is the wife having a bad time too? Yes. ‘On her mangledness I am spreading my amorous sheets, but who will have any pride in the wedding red, seeping up between the thighs of love which rise like a ...”

“... Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American beau monde nor Eakins’s moral passion at the ...”

“... performance and a private archive, can also be found outside art galleries, rendering them even more difficult to decipher in aesthetic terms. They can nonetheless be taken to indicate a distinctive turn in recent art. In play in the first two examples – works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and by Rirkrit Tiravanija – is a notion of art as an ephemeral ...”

“... heroine and her father would travel all over Europe – ‘Plan of a Novel’ would require rather more space than the ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory’ that Austen told her nephew was enough for one of her novels – meeting ‘a wide variety of Characters’ that hardly resembled real people: ‘All the Good will be unexceptionable in every ...”

“... In around 799 he was lauded by an anonymous poet as pater Europae, the father of Europe. In more recent times too, the name of Charlemagne has been used to evoke an idea of European integration. Immediately after the Second World War, when historians looked back at Charlemagne across the wreckage of the Carolingian heartlands, they saw the costs of his ...”