“... watching football games on television, grumbling at the performance of the New York Giants and Frank Gifford. Attentive readers will spot the echo of A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley’s classic account of his obsession with the Giants and Gifford, and his bleary tumble into alcoholism, cheap broads and a succession of lumpy sofas. Like Exley, patron saint ...”

“... in the process. By 1983, the centenary of the birth of both John Maynard Keynes (died 1946) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (died 1950), it was the less dirigiste Schumpeter, so economists were saying, who spoke to the needs of the hour. The Age of Keynes thus gave way to the Age of Schumpeter, as can be confirmed by searching their respective names on ...”

“... are eventually ‘ready to tear their own heads off rather than face another round of full and frank discussion’. In another, he has his great uncle in conversation with an Egyptian holy man, who persuasively claims that ancient Egypt had not only been culturally prior to Europe but greater than anything that had ever existed there. Reiner Reineck, by ...”

“... blame his afflictions on the tropics. When Leiris looks around him, there is no better journalist: frank to the point of insolence, often very funny, with an eye for detail and, though he never stops writing, a knack for concision. In Ethiopia he records the moment when Abba Jérôme joins the team in Gondar and pays his respects at the Italian consulate. In ...”

“... by essentially compilatory works, the long lists and catalogues that culminated in the work of Joseph Eckhel, another Austrian and curator of the imperial coin cabinet in Vienna. His Doctrina numorum veterum invented some of the classificatory principles with which we still work, for instance the sequence in which Greek coinages are presented in ...”

“... is right’ marches and the grind of time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment ...”

“... into the darkness, light as a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the ...”

“... McGuinness’s Other People’s Countries; the half-Nigerian, half-Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi; Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which makes acute distinctions between the privileged economic migration of the Dutch banker who narrates the novel, and the much less privileged immigration of the Trinidadian trickster who is the book’s tragic hero; the work ...”

“... had always been a few who took an interest in their pupils. In the first years of the century, Joseph Jowett of Trinity Hall (who arranged the setting from Handel which became famous as the chime of Big Ben) was noted ‘for the perennial freshness of his interest in young men’ – though he, like Simeon, was drawn to them by his evangelical faith in ...”

“... to read him or consult him.GP: Do you enjoy reading him?TP: I haven’t really read one, to be frank. I haven’t even read A Human Document, as book.GP: So when you bought it, you started work on it straight away?TP: I found things of interest in it. I didn’t realise it would go on so long. I’m still doing it.GP: Will it ever be finished?TP: I’ve ...”

“... that she was an American artist in the undomesticated tradition that includes Emily Dickinson and Frank Lloyd Wright, someone who made things in the risky artistic spirit that seeks personal sources and methods, programmatically refusing to begin by using what lies to hand. Her stage uses of the body, for example, eliminated the whole pictorial memory of ...”

“... Cosgrave, the President of the Executive Council of the Free State; he also became friendly with Joseph MacRory, later Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh. Herzog was a born diplomat. By the time of his departure for Palestine, he had ensured that, despite the odd anti-semitic outburst from diehard nationalists or Catholics, ‘the Jewish ...”

“... who would be castigated in Death in the Afternoon for writing too much and being unedited. Joseph Fruscione’s Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry shows the two writers dancing round each other for several decades, making much of their differences and generally vying for supremacy.3 But these American modernists, Fitzgerald ...”

“... of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No Londoner, according to the ...”

“... you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a seven-pointed shape. With its head turning left to right, and its eyes ...”